No longer a battle for first in WCC, 151st Gonzaga-WSU meeting should still be appointment viewing

Even without Washington State on the schedule, Gonzaga has managed to keep up appearances with its other rivals over the past eight seasons.

A West Coast Conference rivalry with Saint Mary’s has been brewing for the better part of 50 years, reaching a boiling point last season when the Gaels made the trip up for a rowdy game at McCarthey Athletic Center.

Semiregular meetings with UCLA have always produced cinematic endings, often on the NCAA Tournament stage, creating a healthy amount of animosity between the West Coast powers over the past three decades.

Encounters with Washington have been sporadic, and could be even more sparse in the future, but the Huskies always bring added anticipation and excitement to Gonzaga’s nonconference schedule.

Santa Clara and San Francisco, not rivals in the traditional sense, are typically good for a scare or two every year in the WCC and tend to draw solid crowds both at home and on the road.

Yet, when looking at proximity, frequency, longevity and other elements that constitute a classic college basketball rivalry, nobody has met the criteria like Washington State.

That’s why Saturday’s matchup between the 18th-ranked Zags (13-4, 4-0) and Cougars (13-4, 3-1) – the first between the schools since 2015 – will be appointment television around the Inland Northwest, even if it no longer sets up as a battle for first place in the WCC.

“Just the in-state bragging rights, they’re an hour and a half away from us,” senior forward Ben Gregg said. “We play at the Warehouse sometimes and they come down in the summertime for open gyms and pickups. We’re familiar with those guys, but it is nice to have a rivalry that we’re going to play twice, here and there.

“It’s kind of different than having a preseason game where you’re only playing once. I can’t wait to have a little rivalry spark up and it’s going to be fun for a lot of years to come.”

WSU’s season took an unexpected turn Thursday when the Cougars stumbled 95-94 in overtime against Pacific at Beasley Coliseum, giving the Tigers their first win over a WCC opponent since March 2, 2023.

A Quad 4 home loss not only changed the outlook of WSU’s season, possibly doing irreversible damage to the Cougars’ at-large NCAA Tournament aspirations, but it also changed the narrative around Saturday’s game. It placed coach David Riley’s group in somewhat of a must-win scenario two weeks into the conference schedule while giving Mark Few’s Zags a chance to move two games clear of WSU at the top of an improved WCC.

Gonzaga’s spring semester doesn’t begin until Tuesday, but the university opened student housing early for Saturday’s game.

The Bulldogs anticipate their “Kennel Club” to fill up for the 151st meeting between the schools. GU’s last game with students in attendance came on Nov. 21, when the Bulldogs hosted Long Beach State before traveling to the Battle 4 Atlantis.

“It’s nice to get other people in the gym here that maybe don’t have a chance, but obviously, when the students are in here it’s a very different atmosphere and very different building,” Few said.

“The building’s louder, but it’s also like I said, it gets you going instead of you having to get it going.”

WSU holds a 98-52 advantage in the all-time series, but GU’s controlled the rivalry under Few, winning 14 of the past 17 matchups since 1998.

The series was discontinued after Gonzaga’s 69-60 victory in 2015, but WSU’s decision to join the WCC as a temporary affiliate member guarantees at least four matchups over the next two seasons. The schools will renew the rivalry on a permanent basis when they both move to the Pac-12 starting in 2025-26.

“It’s definitely exciting,” Gonzaga’s Graham Ike said. “Get a new matchup, get a new team in the league that we might not have faced in a while. This will be my first time facing them in my career, so it’s definitely an exciting task which we’ll be up for. No doubt about it.”

The rivalry itself may be new to current Zags and Cougars, but there’s plenty of familiarity between the players and coaching staffs.

Riley, a former Whitworth player who spent 14 years at Eastern Washington as a graduate assistant, assistant coach and head coach, adopted many of his offensive strategies while watching Few’s program and acknowledged he tried to pattern his game after GU All-American Adam Morrison.

During a sit-down interview with KHQ earlier this week, Riley said he watched “damn near every Gonzaga game,” and made a point to catch the Bulldogs on the road at Santa Clara and Saint Mary’s while he was residing in Palo Alto, California.

“He’s done an amazing, amazing job,” Few said of Riley, who won 44 games over the last two seasons at EWU and still has a shorthanded WSU team in position to compete for a top-three spot in the WCC. “They just play so – they’re kind of fearless, they’re very physical, they’re smart. They play like a very old team and they look like they’ve played together a long time.

“He’s done a good job putting them in a system that kind of accentuates that and watching them, it looks like they really frustrate some of the teams that they play. So we’re going to have to be physically tough and mentally tough, but yeah he’s done a wonderful job.”

Gonzaga’s Steele Venters won’t play Saturday due to a torn ACL, but the veteran wing likely brought some value to the team’s film sessions. Venters played for Riley in Cheney. Three of his former EWU teammates, LeJuan Watts, Ethan Price and Dane Erikstrup, will be in WSU’s starting lineup on Saturday.

Ike, who’s leading Gonzaga at 16.3 points and 7.6 rebounds per game, had an offer from WSU under former coach Kyle Smith and took a recruiting trip to Pullman during his senior year at Overland High in Colorado.

As Gregg alluded to, Gonzaga players often mingle and mix with counterparts at WSU and EWU during offseason runs at the Warehouse facility owned by John Stockton that sits adjacent to GU’s campus.

Saturday’s game pits the WCC’s top offensive teams against each other, with Gonzaga averaging 87.8 points and WSU averaging 82.3. The Bulldogs rank No. 23 nationally in field-goal percentage at 49.18%, but the Cougars are a shade better, sitting No. 22 in the country at 49.2%.

“It’s going to be a hard-fought game, it’s going to be a battle,” Gregg said. “Coming in with our hard hats on like coach says, just expecting the physicality and getting ready mentally. Mentally preparing.

“But this is the games we came here for, these types of rivalries in these environments. So I can’t wait.”

Notes: It’s unclear if Gonzaga’s Michael Ajayi or Jun Seok Yeo will be available on Saturday after missing Wednesday’s game against San Diego due to illness. WSU’s Price expects to play after leaving Thursday’s game against Pacific late in the second half and missing overtime with lower-body cramps.