They became catnip for night owls, must-see TV for the insomniacs among us.
Hours after ACC basketball hit the hay and after the Big 12 tucked itself into bed, the West Coast Conference, starring Mark Few’s Gonzaga Bulldogs, would treat our bleary eyes.
Gonzaga ‘Til Midnight — or beyond, depending on your time zone — became the college hoops predecessor to Pac-12 After Dark.
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It started in earnest in 2001, when ESPN struck a deal with the WCC. By then, the Zags were already of “The slipper still fits!” fame.
Gonzaga served up such late-night ESPN fare as playing St. John’s at midnight Eastern on Thanksgiving night in the ’01 Great Alaska Shootout (RIP), the perfect pairing for your third slice of pumpkin pie.
Gonzaga beat the Johnnies, of course, because Zags basketball is good any time of day, but it’s spectacular in the wee hours.
Trading sleep for hoops meant watching Few’s assembly line of stars. Dan Dickau. Ronny Turiaf. Kelly Olynyk. Rui Hachimura. Drew Timme. Present-day Graham Ike.
And who could forget Mr. Mustache himself, Adam Morrison, the only thing finer in 2006 than J.J. Redick?
The casuals didn’t catch their annual glimpse of Gonzaga until March Madness. The diehards and the sleep-deprived had a catalogue of film on them by then. They watched the WCC grow up alongside Gonzaga.
As BYU cycled in and then out of the league, the WCC maintained staying power to the point it regularly sends multiple teams to the NCAA Tournament. The Gonzaga-Saint Mary’s series blossomed into one of the best rivalries anywhere on the Pacific Coast.
No matter how sturdy the WCC became in any given year, Gonzaga kept showing up in the conference tournament finals.
Death. Taxes. Gonzaga cutting down WCC nets on a weeknight in early March.
Conference realignment consumes all things holy in the end, and Gonzaga’s majestic, nocturnal run in the WCC concluded this season — but not before one last celebration.
Gonzaga beat Santa Clara in the WCC final, 79-68 on Tuesday, because how else was this supposed to end but with Few celebrating his 21st conference tournament title?
“We’re 30-3 now," Few said of his team's record entering March Madness, where the Bulldogs are a projected 3-seed, "which is a hell of a record, a hell of a year."
And not finished yet. Just done with the WCC.
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Gonzaga will move next season into the Pac-Whatever Conference, a Pac-12 cheap-fake.
The decades-long WCC-Gonzaga union provided a runway for Few to go 56-6 in WCC tournament games.
Pause, for a moment, and marvel at that record.
I don’t care the league is filled with a bunch of private California schools with smallish enrollments instead of Duke and North Carolina or Kansas and Arizona, the WCC is no joke, and winning 56 times in 62 tries against teams playing for their shot at a March Madness ticket is serious dominance.
Gonzaga rules West Coast Conference, to the end
This team won’t go down as Few’s most electric, but you wouldn’t have known that with the way Gonzaga rallied after Santa Clara dominated the first half.
“It’s a special feeling to go out the right way — on top,” Ike, Gonzaga’s star, told reporters, with a WCC champions hat perched on his head. “Ultimately, we ended where we started this … We started off with championships. That team and those teams that came before us, we just wanted to continue the success that they had.”
Ike must have remembered at halftime he was the best player in the building. He finished with 15 points on perfect shooting. Few was so pleased he publicly stumped for his senior big man’s All-America bona fides.
“He has absolutely, unequivocally, carried us,” Few said on ESPN afterward.
Gonzaga's got its very own Super Mario, too. That's Mario Saint-Supery, who went off for six 3-pointers and 21 points.
The real story, though, was the same as it's been all year for Gonzaga: Its defense ruled the day, leaving Santa Clara on the NCAA bubble, although in Few’s eyes the Broncos ought to be a slam-dunk selection alongside Saint Mary’s. That’d be good for three WCC bids for the fourth time since 2008 and probably the last time for a while, with Gonzaga leaving.
Gonzaga’s conference departure ranks nowhere near the worst sin of realignment. It’s something of an upset the WCC managed to hang on for so long to this team that outgrew the Cinderella label long ago. Surely, the Zags will keep playing late-night tipoffs in their new home. Networks need late-night programming, and Gonzaga is a reliable supplier.
Gonzaga let the night owls off easy in this WCC swan song. It wasn’t even midnight yet on the East Coast when Few donned the postgame headset for a chat with Scott Van Pelt.
Still, the Las Vegas sun was long gone, and night had replaced it. To the very end, Gonzaga ruled the West Coast after dark.
Blake Toppmeyer is a columnist for the USA TODAY Network. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on X @btoppmeyer.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Gonzaga ruled late-night TV, to very end of its WCC basketball days
