Bulldogs still have hope for ticket to dance

SANTA CLARA, Calif – There has been a temptation through Gonzaga University’s recent rise in the women’s basketball world to note any and every parallel with a certain men’s program that happens to share the same gymnasium.

Which is mostly unnecessary.

Whatever the Bulldog women have achieved – right up to their No. 23 national ranking – they’ve done on their own terms and deserve their own unobstructed glow.

Then along came a hatful of rain Sunday afternoon, and now some of those parallels are instructive, and even ominous. The mini-meltdown the Zags suffered in losing the West Coast Conference tournament championship game to Santa Clara 77-66 has now flushed them into that regrettable eddy of March Madness – the holding pattern of wishing, lobbying, cajoling and praying forced on teams who didn’t make the most of their moment.

At-large hell. Have the men ever been there and done that.

But after 23 consecutive wins, the Bulldog women had no inkling they’d ever need those particular skills to get into this NCAA tournament.

“It was a great run,” said Gonzaga coach Kelly Graves. “I figured at some point it was going to end, that winning streak, but I was hoping it wasn’t going to be today.”

Hope wasn’t enough against the Broncos’ fusillade of 3-pointers – 14 on the day and seven in a row, a latent vulnerability the Zags also now seem to share with the men’s team, if you can draw one of those parallels from a single game.

“We’ve never had anybody work us like that,” marveled Graves. “We just haven’t.”

True enough, the Zags hadn’t given up more than 62 points to any WCC team this season during a 14-0 blitz through the league, and only New Mexico and Arizona State – which both beat Gonzaga to gain entry into the Top 25 – put up that many all season.

But this was no wild-shooting fluke by another outfit lucky enough to be playing a title game at its own place. The Broncos also defended the Zags into their worst shooting night in three months, perhaps helped by the limited effectiveness of WCC Player of the Year Shannon Mathews, who hobbled through 18 minutes.

Whatever happened to their game, the Zags must now play another one.

Graves insisted he would not devote the six days between now and Selection Sunday to working the worry beads and mounting furious campaigns for the at-large NCAA bid the Bulldogs now need.

“What can I do about it?” he shrugged. “I’ve got three kids who need help with their math homework this week. I’m not going to spend a whole lot of time worrying about it. I would like to think and be confident the conference will work for us and make the right lobbying effort and get us in.

“I think we deserve it.”

Of course, the men thought they deserved it when they won the WCC regular season in both 1994 and, especially, 1998 but stumbled in the conference tournament. Before they became the bulletproof sure thing they are now, they took a couple of slugs, and at least once it was a travesty.

Still, neither episode would compare if the women are dissed this time.

No women’s team in the previous five seasons has won 27 games and not been selected. Last year, Utah won 24 games and was left unrewarded, something of an eyebrow-archer in that the Utes also were a Top 40 team in the Ratings Percentage Index, the NCAA’s imperfect barometer of quantifying common sense.

Previous to that, some other teams – Siena and Maine in 2003, Hawaii in 2002, Chattanooga in 2000 – got the same treatment. But they all had 25 wins or less, not 27.

“And what people forget is we had 23 wins in a row,” Graves said. “I know the committee puts an emphasis on your last 10 games, but I see some of these teams listed as being on the bubble at 5-5 and I’m thinking, ‘We won 23 in a row.’ If that’s not finishing well, I don’t know.”

The Zags’ RPI yesterday morning was 49, dragged down somewhat by the WCC’s conference ranking of 14 – its lowest in the last five years. As the men did in the nascent stages of their success, the women will have to sweat out the scheduling factor – though not altogether fairly.

“Maybe we don’t have as many quality wins as we could have,” acknowledged Graves, “but it’s not because we didn’t try to play people. There were different teams I thought would be better – I thought Idaho would win 22 or 23 again. But Utah is a Top 30 win, and Montana is going to be a tournament team. Our only three losses have been to Top 25 teams and today.”

And though it hasn’t happened the past two years, the NCAA has regularly bestowed an additional berth on the WCC – seven of the nine years between 1994 and 2002, in fact.

“Those years I was (an assistant) at Portland, all four of those years we made the NCAA there was a second team in,” Graves said.

“But quite frankly, we haven’t seen a team like ours in this league – a team that’s ranked at the end of the season, on the run that we’ve been. I don’t think this is a typical year for our conference, and I know this isn’t a typical team.”

Well, it’s typical in one respect. Even the most remarkable teams often have to take their progress in increments – as GU has – and then gets one extra step thrown at it.

“I just thought it was our time,” Graves said.

It isn’t the first time they’ve thought that at Gonzaga.