I was afraid of that...

I know there are bunches of you who are as disappointed as I am that the Gonzaga Bulldogs were knocked out of the NCAA tournament.

There are also a lot of naysayers who didn’t think the Zags deserved to be rated No. 1 in the polls or receive a No. 1 seed in the tournament.

To that I say, really? I don’t remember the Bulldogs blabbing that they deserved a top seed or suggest they should be voted number one in the nation. I do remember Coach Mark Few say that he and his team are honored to be recognized in that capacity. They also said they knew that receiving that recognition didn’t equate to automatic wins.

What it did provide was more incentive for the teams they played to want to knock them off that perch they were set up on. I look back a couple of weeks ago and remember just how much the Zags wanted to win the WCC tournament. They wanted to take back that top spot after surrendering it to St. Mary’s a year ago. That’s not an excuse but a reality.

I do think it’s interesting at just how important winning the WCC is to the Zags. Duke didn’t win the ACC and Indiana lost in the Big 10 tournament. Stiffer competition, of course, but Indiana still received a No. 1 seed. Duke’s loss dropped them to a No. 2 seed.

Personally, I don’t think a team should get a number one seed if they lose in their conference tournament. Indiana lost three out of their last six games, and that equated to a No. 1 seed? Say what you want about Gonzaga, all they did was what they were supposed to do which was to beat as many teams as possible on their schedule, 31-2 sort of speaks for itself.

You can also criticize the league they play in but the only other option that was out there was to play in the new Big East with the seven Catholic schools. That would mean traveling every other week to New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey or Washington, D.C. I don’t think that would be very cost effective or very good for college students wanting to earn a degree. I also don’t think the other teams would be happy about traveling to Pacific Standard Time for a prime time game, which would be about 11 p.m. east coast time.

No, Gonzaga needs to stay in the WCC, where they were when they were an also-ran battling much stronger teams. For those of you who are recent Zag fans that was prior to 1994. Of course the Zags now get the best talent in the league, but they wear the big target on their back as well.

Gonzaga has set the standard for the other WCC schools to bolster their nonconference schedule early in the season and to improve with tougher competition.

The biggest drawback to most of these schools is the small venues they play in. Sure BYU has a 20,000-seat arena, but LMU is around 2,500. Several other gyms are similar. There aren’t a lot of big schools that will play a game there. Gonzaga has made those big steps to get to where they are today, and they made those big steps in less than 15 years though the foundation was set in the five years prior.

You can say disparaging remarks about what happened to Gonzaga, but you can’t deny how classy the players and coaching staff are.

There were no excuses, they credited how the other teams played and recognized that Wichita State beat them.

It is hard to find a lot of players and coaches who would not at least say, “We played horrible!” or “We weren’t the same team after Gary Bell Jr. got hurt.” But that’s not their style.

I put most of the blame on Charles Barkley. He said that Gonzaga was going to win, which may have been the kiss of death because I’m not sure Barkley was right on any of his picks.

There are some who will say we need to recruit some bruisers that can play this new brand of so-called basketball that dictates intimidation and be physically brutal.

But that would also compromise Gonzaga’s reputation of having great kids that are scholar athletes, who interview well because they believe in the team concept.

I was afraid that the Zags were going to go home early from the tournament, but it certainly doesn’t take anything from the fantastic year this team rewarded us with.

There is a lot more to winning teams than records. This team gave us so much more than that and we should appreciate what we received.