NCAA basketball

Former Gonzaga coach Kelly Graves has coached a Final Four and four Elite Eight teams, and a potential NCAA champion whose shot was taken away by the pandemic. But to many in women’s college basketball, Graves is Bracket Killer Kelly.

Difference makers

It required all of five minutes to determine who the superior Bulldogs were at Intrust Bank Arena. Gonzaga scored 27 of the first 30 points, established a 25-point lead in the first half and steamrolled its SEC opponent for an 89-68 victory.

The senior guard from Seattle knocked down five 3-pointers and scored 18 points to guide eighth-seeded Gonzaga past No. 9 Georgia 89-68 Thursday in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament.

WICHITA, Kan. – Here are three observations from Gonzaga’s 89-68 win over Georgia on Thursday in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.

PULLMAN – In a back room at the Spokane Arena, where Washington State freshman guard Tomas Thrastarson enjoyed a career-best scoring outing in late December, his head coach and teammates couldn’t stop raving about him.

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – Sometimes a March Madness selection committee can seem daft, and sometimes it can seem shadowy, and sometimes, to a certain type of fan prone to foaming at the mouth, it can seem satanic. Yet all the while there remain those times when it seems a bunch of puckish pranksters who shovel certain teams into a certain corner of the draw and then start giggling.

SEATTLE – Tina Langley has spent four seasons stacking bricks.

WICHITA, Kan. – When building a list of the best high school basketball teams in recent memory, it’d be easy to make a case for two teams from Florida-based Montverde Academy.

WICHITA, Kan. – With more than two decades of success on the sport’s biggest stage, it requires a considerable amount of ink to print all of Gonzaga’s NCAA Tournament superlatives and streaks.

Gonzaga is busy preparing to play Georgia on Thursday in the NCAA Tournament, college basketball’s biggest stage. But a few Zags made time Wednesday to applaud former teammate Anton Watson, who scored his first NBA points Monday with the New York Knicks at Madison Square Garden, one of the biggest stages in the world.

Creator and curator of a hoop phenomenon unique to college athletics, mastermind of offensive efficiency, motivator of elite athletes. Mark Few is all of that. Globally appreciated. Unknown until recently, though, has been his capacity to coach desperation.

WICHITA, Kan. – From Mark Few’s dinner table to the top of Gonzaga’s scouting report, Georgia’s Asa Newell not only qualifies as the most important matchup of Thursday’s NCAA Tournament opener between the WCC Zags and SEC Bulldogs, but one of the most intriguing of GU’s season, given the history between the freshman standout and one of the schools that nearly landed his services.

It’s not the biggest of dances but at least the Gonzaga women’s basketball team was selected. For the five departing players, it’s one more home game.

With March Madness as the frenzied backdrop, executives from the Pac-12 and Mountain West churn forward in pursuit of media rights agreements for their restructured conferences beginning in the summer of 2026. There's nothing at stake except hundreds of millions of dollars, coveted exposure on major broadcast and cable networks and security for the remainder of the decade.

The early rounds of the NCAA women’s basketball tournament generally don’t incite as much madness as the men’s event. Higher seeds are typically much more successful on the women’s side; no seed lower than a No. 3 has won the women’s tournament over the past two decades, a span in which Connecticut won the men’s tournament as a No. 7 and a No. 4 seed. No team seeded worse than No. 5 has even reached the women’s final, and the Elite Eight and Final Four are similarly dominated by the nation’s best teams. All but one Final Four team over the last decade has been at least a No. 4 seed.

Venters knew he’d torn his left Achilles tendon and a second straight season would be spent doing months of rehabilitation and watching from the bench instead of playing with his teammates.

We checked in with Jack Leo, who has watched Georgia play all season, for a Q&A to get a closer look at the program. Leo covers Georgia basketball for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Dawgnation.

“Khalif Battle is built for March.”