No. 3 Zags not blasé about ‘Jesuit Throwdown’

Good to have “The Sopranos” back on the tube. But when did they add Jim Nantz and Billy Packer to the cast?

Watching Nantz go all Paulie Walnuts on Sunday afternoon in grilling selection committee chair Craig Littlepage on the makeup of this year’s NCAA Basketball Tournament field was almost as much fun as watching Adam Morrison bank a game-winning 3-pointer off the glass – and just as rare. Heck, Nantz never so much as makes eye contact when he’s polishing Hootie Johnson’s shoes at the Masters.

But CBS has a product to sell, and guard dogs Nantz and Packer were obviously distraught on how to do it with as many teams from the Missouri Valley Conference – faceless schools out there in the middle of America – in the bracket as from the ACC, which is the center of the basketball universe, and Jim and Billy’s, too.

Meanwhile, merrily above the fray – the Gonzaga Bulldogs.

Third-seeded, assigned to nearby Salt Lake City, tanned, rested and ready. Well, four out of five ain’t bad.

Now, someone did suggest to coach Mark Few that he and the players who’d gathered at his house Sunday didn’t appear too thrilled on the CBS video hookup when their seed number came up – as if a three is an insult, like being asked to use an unlaundered towel all season.

“We were on an eight-second delay,” Few explained. “We have DirecTV at my house. You guys saw it before we did.

“We weren’t really into seeding. We knew we’d play someone really good no matter where we were seeded.”

So blasé was mistaken for bummed?

Not exactly.

On the line next to Gonzaga and the Bulldogs’ opponent come Thursday is Xavier, which might have the best NCAA pedigree for a 14th seed in the history of the tournament.

In fact, to Few, it felt a little like Gonzaga drawing Gonzaga. Not the cuddly Cinderella Gonzaga of six or seven years ago but a version with all the old scars and memories of March Madness, who’d had to backdoor its way into the tournament and had a chip on its shoulder.

Welcome to Jesuit Throwdown.

Yes, like Gonzaga, the Cincinnati school is another of the 19 Jesuit institutions that play Division I basketball. And while the bracket cognoscenti who were screeching about one thing or another Sunday – the snub of Xavier’s crosstown cousin Cincinnati, the Missouri Valley overload and a handful of seeding snafus – it’s a wonder Littlepage didn’t get blindsided by this:

“Craig, the number of Jesuit teams in this year’s tournament is almost double that of a year ago – is religion more important than RPI?”

Hey, everything’s an issue.

The issue at hand for Gonzaga, of course, is dealing with the Musketeers.

“Their program reminds me a lot of what we’ve done out here,” said Few. “They’ve had great deep runs into the tournament and it seems like they’re always in it. I was surprised to see them come up on the 14 line – I’m used to seeing them a five or a six or an eight or nine.”

Just two years ago, Xavier got into the tournament as a seven seed and played its way to the Elite Eight with relatively comfortable wins over Louisville, Mississippi State and Texas – those last two being second and third seeds. Four regulars from that team remain, though Dedrick Finn was dismissed from this team three games before the end of the season.

That and the loss of leading scorer Brian Thornton to a broken ankle led to a seventh-place finish in the Atlantic-10 Conference, but the Musketeers reeled off four straight wins in the conference tourney to snag the automatic bid. They wouldn’t be alive now otherwise.

But this is also their 15th NCAA appearance in 21 years.

“Difficult matchup,” insisted Few. “But unless you’re on the No. 1 line, you’d better have your hard hat on and be ready to go.”

Any number of people thought Gonzaga and its 27-3 record might wind up on the No. 2 line, anyway, given other teams’ slip-ups in their own conference tournaments Saturday and Sunday. If there were an obvious spot for the Zags on that line, it was the one given to Tennessee, which managed to lose four of its last six games, which is a little like being nominated for an Oscar for your role in an Army training film.

Littlepage kind of skated over the Tennessee issue and lauded Gonzaga’s nonconference schedule but did note that “a point of distinction may have had to do with the rigor that Tennessee or some of the teams on the second line had to go through all season long.”

In other words, the company GU keeps in the West Coast Conference strikes again.

Need it be said again? Everything’s an issue in this bracket business.

Starting now, the Zags and the other 64 lucky schools have but one issue that matters – the team in front of them. Everything else, including the expectation that this is the season Gonzaga needs to advance further than the second round or risk some sort of public humiliation, is wasted energy. For the Zags, their fans, their critics and even Jim and Billy, there’s one good piece of advice:

Xavier breath.