Gonzaga commentary

Yeah, No. 9-ranked Gonzaga pulled away from a gritty first-half effort by Washington State on Thursday to move to 18-1. But that was nowhere near the headline from the night.

To extract expectations from recent history, this Gonzaga basketball team should find huge success come March. Or the world will once again be struck by a global pandemic. Either way there is great promise with this team, and also a hint of mystery around it.

Without question, the Zags are back on the track they negotiated successfully in their first seven wins.

Just nine seconds into Gonzaga’s basketball game against Michigan last week, Wolverine forward Yaxel Lendeborg swished a distant 3-point shot.

LAS VEGAS – They call this tournament the Players Era Festival.

Two convincing wins in two nights is a parlay that landed Gonzaga in the title game at The Players Era Championship, and has focused the national spotlight on the undefeated Zags.Win or lose Wednesday against Michigan, and Gonzaga is sure to continue the rocket ride up from its preseason No. 21 ranking.

LAS VEGAS – The Zags looked like a million bucks Monday night.

The Zags will say goodbye to the WCC at the end of this season, joining the newly reconfigured Pacific-12 Conference. It should be a fond farewell, as the WCC has served them well. So well, in fact, that a consensus exists among three former Zags – from periods before and after and during the move out of the Big Sky: All agree, Gonzaga could never have reached its current elite status without first making that conference shift in 1979.

Cluck-U Chicken. That was the name of the only food joint open deep into a night in the early 1990s, somewhere near Santa Clara. Details now fuzzy from the intervening decades, I found myself driving Dan Monson, Mark Few and Bill Grier on a midnight food run. Had somebody told me, on that night so long ago, that Gonzaga basketball would become one of the most-unlikely success stories in the history of college sports, man, I’d have choked on my chicken.