‘It legitimizes it.’ Future Pac-12 foes weigh in on Gonzaga’s addition – a ‘massive’ coup for the reformed conference

LAS VEGAS – Mountain West Media Day, West Coast Conference Media Day or a 24-hour summit for teams headed to the new-look Pac-12 Conference?

At times, last week’s media gathering at Resorts World in Las Vegas could have passed as all three.

During a joint MWC/WCC Media Day, it was especially hard to ignore the elephant in the room – what with seven future Pac-12 members filtering in and out of large meeting rooms in Vegas, mingling with one another and finding different ways to answer many of the same questions about their conference affiliation after the 2025-26 season.

The most recent news development in the Pac-12 was naturally the most popular one last week in Vegas. Gonzaga, after years of exploratory conversations and closed-door meetings with conferences such as the Mountain West, Big East and Big-12, joined the Pac-12 earlier this month as its eighth official member and first nonfootball school.

“I just think when you start any conversation with a basketball conference that includes San Diego State and Gonzaga, it’s a good thing,” said San Diego State coach Brian Dutcher, whose Aztecs pulled out an 84-74 win over GU in Spokane last year and will host the Zags three weeks from now at Viejas Arena. “You look at West Coast Final Fours over the last 25 years, you’re talking about two of the teams that have been there. And I think UCLA being the third. I think Arizona went in 2001. So you’re talking about West Coast presence, West Coast powerhouses and I think any conference that starts with those two teams is a good thing.”

The Zags bring basketball pedigree into a conference that will feature two original Pac-12 members, Washington State and Oregon State, along with five defectors from the Mountain West: San Diego State, Boise State, Utah State, Colorado State and Fresno State.

An eighth football member is needed to qualify for FBS status, but that school hasn’t been identified.

“It’s massive. It’s kind of even hard to overstate that,” Colorado State coach Niko Medved said. “I know I was a huge proponent of (Gonzaga), I know John (Weber), our athletic director who’s here and our president Amy (Parsons). I was a proponent in Mountain West meetings.

“What are we doing? Do we have an opportunity? And I said, ‘Boy, if there’s anything we can do to add the Zags, that would be terrific.’ And when that news became official, again I think it’s just massive.”

For a midmajor conference in the current college basketball climate, seasons don’t get much better than 2023-24 in the Mountain West. The conference sent six teams to the NCAA Tournament and went 4-5, with SDSU, Utah State and Colorado State all winning at least one game and the Aztecs advancing through to the Sweet 16.

Washington State made its first NCAA Tournament appearance since 2008, and snagged an opening-round win against Drake.

“It’s exciting,” said new Cougars coach David Riley, who replaces Kyle Smith. “The league, when you look at the Pac-12, I mean the teams that are coming in it’s a really, really good basketball league. You’ve got multiple teams that have been to the Final Four and you look at the amount of teams that went to the NCAA Tournament every year, it’s going to be a battle every single night.”

Future Pac-12 teams accounted for seven total wins in last year’s tournament, including the two from Gonzaga, which cruised past McNeese State and Kansas before losing to top-seeded Purdue in the Sweet 16.

“Absolutely ecstatic,” Utah State’s Jerrod Calhoun said, recalling his reaction when the Gonzaga news became official. “I think anytime you can get in the same conference as the Zags, you’re heading in the right direction. I think what coach (Mark) Few and what Gonzaga’s done for college basketball’s been amazing. One of my favorite teams. I love the way they play, I love the way Arizona plays.

“We play a little bit similar style where we’re going to give our guys a lot of confidence, a lot of space and you want to play with pace.”

Boise State’s Leon Rice has connections up and down the new Pac-12. The 60-year-old coach is obviously familiar with the four other teams joining from the Mountain West, but he’s also a Richland native who graduated from Washington State and remains a close friend of Few, who employed Rice as an assistant from 1999-2010.

Rice and Few are ardent supporters of the other’s program and have always declined opportunities to schedule nonconference games. Two years from now, the Pac-12 schedule will likely serve up two games between Gonzaga and BSU – one in Spokane, one in the Treasure Valley – with a third matchup potentially arising at the conference tournament.

“That’s two years away,” Rice said. “We’ll cross that bridge when we have to. We can be friends for two more years, then we’ll see.”

As for what GU brings to the new conference, the 15th-year Boise State coach is adamant “it legitimizes it in basketball.”

“Not that it wasn’t,” Rice said. “We’ve got some really good basketball teams that have gone to that league. I think one of the most important things too, because Mark’s such a big thinker. He’s going to help that league in a lot of ways that people don’t understand. Because there’s nothing he’ll settle for, he’s going to make it better by having Gonzaga and him in that league.”

During his tenure in the WCC, Few has advocated for a variety of changes spanning from the format of the conference tournament, which gives the WCC’s top two seeds an automatic bye to the semifinal round, to a shortened regular-season schedule, creating more opportunities for Gonzaga to play quality teams in the nonconference.

Will Few have the same influence in a conference in which the gap between Gonzaga and its opponents is expected to be much smaller than it’s been in the WCC most years?

“Now I won’t say this to his face, but when he says something about basketball and things like that, he’s usually right and I listen, but I won’t tell him that,” Rice said. “He doesn’t think I listen. We like to argue stuff sometimes, but he has a great feel for that and he knows about the numbers and he knows about the NCAA Tournament, and he knows about how to get there obviously, and he knows how to win games in that tournament. So we should listen and he should have two votes instead of one.”

Nonetheless, Gonzaga’s addition amps up the pressure on other future Pac-12 members to invest resources into men’s basketball, knowing they’ll have to keep up with a school that’s made two national championship appearances, had 20 players drafted under Few and accumulated a 10-2 record against the sport’s “blue bloods” – UCLA, Duke, Kentucky, Kansas, North Carolina – over the past five years.

“I know it should, I just hope we do (invest),” said first-year Fresno State coach Vance Walberg, who spent two years facing Gonzaga in the WCC while coaching at Pepperdine from 2006-08. “I think they know and the nice thing, I know our new AD Garrett (Klassy), he’s been around, he knows what it’s going to take to do that and if we don’t, we’ll be at that bottom and I don’t want to be there and they don’t want to be there.”

When the Zags routed Kansas in March, securing another trip to the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament, Few received a text message from a future Pac-12 coaching adversary, some six months before the conference rebuilt around Washington State and Oregon State.

OSU’s Wayne Tinkle, a Ferris High School graduate whose father, Wayne Sr., moved the family to Spokane upon becoming Gonzaga’s Dean of Students, wanted to congratulate the coach on stretching the school’s streak of consecutive Sweet 16 appearances to nine.

“We all know he’s done a great job,” Tinkle said, “and it’s going to be fun to compete against those guys.”