NCAA basketball

Welcome to Day 190 of the rebuilt Pac-12’s search for a media rights contract – a process that began immediately after the conference agreed to terms with Gonzaga in early October and brought the membership total to eight.

Gonzaga continues to make headway with one of the most prominent guards currently available in the transfer portal.

PULLMAN – Cedric Coward’s potential return to Washington State is looking less and less likely.

The 2024 West Coast Conference Tournament still hadn’t concluded by the time one of the league’s top performers – Pepperdine point guard Moe Odum – revealed plans to enter the NCAA transfer portal.

Night and day. That’s how marked the difference has been for ex-Washington State standout Mouhamed Gueye between his second NBA season and his rookie campaign.

Gonzaga moved up, down and occasionally outside of the Associated Press Top 25 poll at different points of the 2024-25 college basketball season.

It takes a little more scrolling than usual, but Gonzaga can be found in the bottom portion of nearly every way-too-early top 25 poll for the 2025-26 college basketball season. The Zags appeared in nine of 10 polls – high of No. 18, low of No. 25 and consensus No. 23 – released within 48 hours of Florida’s 65-63 win over Houston in Monday’s national championship.

Florida hung tough despite a host of issues in the first half of Monday night’s NCAA Tournament championship game against Houston. Despite being outrebounded, outmuscled and outshot, not to mention receiving 0 points from star guard Walter Clayton Jr., the Gators trailed by only 3 points at the break.

SAN ANTONIO – The shorts were shorter than the parachutes with drawstrings preferred by college basketball players a couple of decades ago. The rest of this rhapsody in blue at the Alamodome? That matched the moments Florida fans of certain ages surely recall. Players leaping and bouncing off each other, sprinting to the side of the floor to scream at elated supporters, falling into their coaches’ arms for long embraces as the confetti fell.

TAMPA, Fla. – After such a long, winding climb to the top, what a luxury it is to spread your arms, take a breath and enjoy the view unburdened. As her college career was coming to a close, Paige Bueckers played with a demon’s ferocity, hurtling through three straight 30-point performances in the NCAA tournament to ensure her team did not miss out on the chance to end Connecticut’s nine-year championship drought in Sunday’s title game. But when she finally got there, the pressure seemed to release a bit. All she had to do was right there in front of her: win a basketball game.

The only way for blue bloods to receive transformative revenue from media partners would be to keep the circle tight. The networks won't pay big dollars for the likes of Minnesota, South Carolina or Syracuse. It would be the 18-20 obvious schools, then a second tier.

The final month of Ben Gregg’s unique Gonzaga career was packed with many of the twists and turns that marked his 4½ years in the program. In that span, Gregg juggled the emotions of Senior Night, posted arguably his best big-game performance of the season against San Francisco, lost his starting job and wore his No. 33 uniform for the last time against Houston in an NCAA Tournament loss.

Projecting success seven months before the start of the regular season was difficult enough before the transfer portal and immediate eligibility for multi-time transfers collided last spring. In the current environment, accuracy is effectively impossible.

Former Gonzaga forward Michael Ajayi is moving east to the Big East Conference after spending his first four collegiate seasons on the West Coast.

LAS VEGAS -- Tyson Degenhart could've easily chased the money.

TAMPA, Fla. – The drought is over.

SAN ANTONIO – Like his team, Kelvin Sampson would not stop. He kept talking, sentences on sentences on sentences, answering questions that hadn’t been asked, delivering a most lucid ramble to explain an epic comeback.

SAN ANTONIO — J’Wan Roberts extended his hands. Settle down, he said.

For all the uncertainty around Gonzaga’s roster entering 2025-26, at least one thing is abundantly clear: The Zags need bodies in the backcourt after losing at least four rotational pieces from last season’s team that won a conference tournament championship and advanced to the second round of the NCAA Tournament.