John Blanchette: Zags need to be as tough as schedule

Here they go again. Five games in 10 days. Two more round-trip flights and another 3,400 air miles – on top of the 18,000 they’ve logged already. Another Top 25 opponent.

Buckle in. It’s Gonzaga basketball, or as we’ve come to know it “Death Wish 2007.”

Just as they seemed to be back in a familiar rhythm and atop the West Coast Conference standings, the Zags are shaking it up again with a trip to California to play 23rd-ranked Stanford tonight. They’ll buzz back for classes Thursday, then tackle the WCC’s Los Angeles swing this weekend.

And they say Gonzaga isn’t a commuter college.

So maybe it’s time to ask: Is this schedule, this pace, going to get Gonzaga back into the NCAA tournament? Or will it keep the Zags out?

OK, trick question. If the Bulldogs win the WCC tournament come March in Portland, it all becomes just hand-wringing for sport. And, of course, they’ve won seven of the last eight.

But even in their dominant years, the Zags have survived some title-game terror – and since 2001, the last time they weren’t a single-digit seed in the NCAAs, it really hasn’t mattered if they won the WCC’s automatic bid or not.

This season it might.

Which is why the Stanford game and the Spokane Arena date with No. 11 Memphis in two weeks loom pretty large.

“I’m not going to lie,” said Gonzaga forward Sean Mallon. “Those would look great on our resume, if we could get those games. But I don’t think we can look that deeply into them. We have to approach it as a game against a very good team and that’s all. We can’t focus on the results and what they’re going to mean in March.”

Smart guy.

Nor can the Zags remake their schedule in January because of some hard knocks they took in December. Coach Mark Few knows the timing of the Stanford game is unfortunate, but it – like several other games – is a child of circumstance.

“You’re trying to fit all the pieces of the schedule jigsaw together and all the teams on it have needs and wants and dates that work only for them,” he said. “We wanted a different date, but their Cal week (when Stanford had just a single Pac-10 game against its rival) didn’t coincide with our Portland week.”

Few may not agree that he overburdened a young team with too much competition – eight of the current Top 25 teams will play GU this year, along with two (Washington and Virginia) which have been ranked. Ambitious out-of-conference scheduling has become a Gonzaga hallmark. But along with some return commitments that had to be honored came some opportunities he didn’t feel the Zags could pass up, and the timing turned out to be brutal.

“Two things happened,” Few said. “One, if you play in the preseason NIT, you have to take a chunk of your season and understand you can’t schedule games then because you don’t know if you’ll make it to New York or not. Two, they added another game this year. So you’re compacting all that in.

“In retrospect, it would have been nice to break up that six-game run a little – to have a guarantee game at home after two of them, and then another a couple games later. Because the biggest thing for us was, emotionally, we had to be at an ‘A’ level every game. We were for Washington and certainly for Texas, and I think for Duke, also. Obviously, for Georgia and Virginia we weren’t, and we weren’t as aggressive as we needed to be against the Cougars – but that’s turned out to be a tough place to play for a lot of teams.”

Gonzaga was the barnstorming heavyweight which showed up at another county fair to take on all comers – and found Ali, Foreman and Frazier waiting for him.

And by going a month with just a single victory, the Bulldogs planted some doubt in the NCAA selectors’ collective consciousness as to their general worthiness. How fair that is given the punishing difficulty of the schedule can be debated, but don’t think it isn’t there.

The Zags have made predictions pointless, but as likely as it is that they get on a roll through February, it is just as possible they could lose to both ranked opponents and even take a couple of hits in the WCC. Should that happen and they not win the WCC tournament, that’s 12 losses they’d have to sneak by the selectors.

Now, 36 teams in the last five years have earned NCAA at-large berths with more than 10 losses. But only one – Richmond, in 2003 – didn’t come from a BCS conference. That’s not particularly comforting.

Does Gonzaga’s out-of-conference schedule make it bulletproof?

“No,” Few insisted. “You have to win some of them.”

Which they did – but have they won enough?

“I know for a fact that in the games we controlled (the scheduling of), the non-league games, nobody can match who we’ve played – where we’ve gone and who we’ve played,” he said. “But we also should have closed the door on Nevada. We had our chances to close the door in Pullman, too, and didn’t get that done. And against Saint Mary’s.”

Which is why it’s nice to have a crack at a couple of more.

Inconvenient, maybe. But perhaps necessary, too.