Gonzaga rewind: Wings Jalen Warley, Tyon Grant-Foster pound the glass in 83-68 rout of Oklahoma

Within the larger goal of winning Saturday’s nonconference game against Oklahoma, Tyon Grant-Foster and Jalen Warley had another objective Saturday night at the Arena.

Twenty-four hours before the 21st-ranked Zags and Sooners played, Grant-Foster and Warley challenged themselves to come up with 16 rebounds. If the transfer wings could reach that total, GU had a good chance of controlling the glass against OU. And if the Zags did that, they’d be in the driver’s seat to grab a key nonleague win.

Coming up just short of th at rebound goal still did the trick for Grant-Foster, Warley and the Zags in an 83-68 rout of the SEC Sooners.

“Yesterday we said we needed 16 rebounds together,” Grant-Foster said, seated next to Warley at a postgame press conference. “We were in the locker room like, we were just one short. I really feel like we just spoke it into existence yesterday with having that conversation.”

The individual tallies for Warley and Grant-Foster added up to 15, with Warley hauling down eight rebounds and Grant-Foster totaling seven more. Those two accounted for nearly a third of Gonzaga’s total rebounds (46), and had nine of the team’s 18 offensive boards.

“I feel like that’s part of our identity, winning the O-board game and the defensive rebounds,” Warley said. “We’re just trying to instill it in our teammates as well.”

Posts Graham Ike and Braden Huff are expected to set the tone in the rebounding department and they haven’t disappointed thus far, combining for 36 boards against Texas Southern and Oklahoma.

But Warley, Grant-Foster and Emmanuel Innocenti – athletic wings with long wingspans and a nose for the ball – have the ability to raise GU’s ceiling are a big reason why the Zags have 37 offensive boards through two games, putting them top 25 in the country at 18.5 per game.

“We talked about how violent they were going to the rim,” Oklahoma coach Porter Moser said of Warley and Grant-Foster. “They just pursued it. It’s deflating sometimes when you get them to miss and that’s nine offensive rebounds between those two guys. Those are just huge because it’s so hard to win period against teams like Gonzaga, but if they’re getting 21 more shot attempts than you, it’s really, really hard.”

Below are two other day-after takeaways from GU’s first win over a high-major opponent.

Anatomy of an alley-oop

With Oklahoma defenders fixated on Ike and Huff, the Zags had success finding backdoor cutters for layups and dunks throughout Saturday’s game.

With under two minutes remaining in the first half, freshman point guard Mario Saint-Supery curled around a screen set by Huff, took two more dribbles and spotted Grant-Foster. The senior wing caught Jeff Nwankwo flat-footed, slipped to the basket behind Oklahoma’s veteran guard and locked eyes with Saint-Supery before pointing an index finger into the air.

Saint-Supery got the message and promptly lobbed a pass into the air. Grant-Foster received the ball with two hands and tossed it into the basket for a lid-lifting jam.

“We’ve been practicing and I told him, ‘Mario, if you throw it up there, I’m going to go get it,’ ” Grant-Foster said. “In practice, he’ll be like ‘oh, my bad, my bad, my bad.’ So I told him on literally the play before, I said, ‘If we do the same play, throw it up and I’m going to go get it.’ And he just threw it up.”

Saint-Supery was the second-to-last player to arrive in Spokane this offseason, officially joining the Zags in early June, but his integration process was delayed by a call-up to Spain’s senior national team in July. Saint-Supery spent about a month away from the team before returning to campus days after Spain’s Sept. 4 loss to Greece at EuroBasket.

Grant-Foster’s window to learn GU’s system has been even smaller. The 25-year-old didn’t start training with the team until early October, but his practice waiver was revoked when the NCAA denied Grant-Foster’s eligibility waiver roughly a week later.

With how little time they’ve had to learn Gonzaga’s playbook, let alone each other’s tendencies, Saint-Supery and Grant-Foster are getting up to speed faster than anticipated and seemed to be on the same page Saturday night.

“I told him in the first practice he had with us, I told him ‘I know you can get that, I need to adapt to you. I need to get used to you,’ ” Saint-Supery said. “I think we’re starting to get that connection and I know he can jump.”

GU, OU may be one-and-done

When Few and Moser agreed to a nonconference game back in May, it wasn’t clear if GU would eventually be making a return trip to face Oklahoma in Sooners territory.

As of Saturday the schools hadn’t arranged a return game, but at least one party expressed interest in resuming the series somewhere a tad closer to OU’s campus in Norman.

“Not yet,” Moser said. “I’d love if they do it, but it’s not scheduled.”

Gonzaga should have a few open dates on its nonconference schedule in 2026-27. The program’s home-and-home series with Arizona State will finish with Friday’s game in Tempe and the current neutral-neutral series with UCLA is set to end after next month’s game against the Bruins at Climate Pledge Arena.

It’s still to be determined whether Gonzaga and Oregon will play the second game of their nonconference series in 2026-27 or 2027-28, Ducks coach Dana Altman said earlier this week. Few’s team is set to play Creighton in Omaha – the return game for the Blue Jays’ visit to Spokane on Tuesday – and will visit Kentucky in Lexington for the fifth game in five seasons against the Wildcats.

If Gonzaga’s dominant interior play and defensive activity weren’t enough, Moser’s Oklahoma squad had to play in front of a pro-Zag crowd at the Arena, with the final attendance figure coming in at 11,081.

“It’s an elite crowd, it’s an elite student section,” Moser said. “They were in it the whole game and from the jump. It’s an elite atmosphere, it’s what you want in there and we’re going to face those in the SEC.”