The men's basketball team at Gonzaga was doomed — or so the coach of the small, Jesuit university would lament.
Dan Monson chuckles now at the memory. In the early 1990s he was a young Gonzaga assistant who would listen as his boss, Dan Fitzgerald, the Bulldogs' coach who died in 2010, would lay out to Monson and Mark Few, another assistant, all the reasons why success in Spokane, Washington, seemed Sisyphean.
Convincing recruits to play at the school's remote campus? Brutally difficult in a conference where Gonzaga's rivals played in cities like San Diego, San Francisco, Portland and Los Angeles. The weather? Icy. Gonzaga's tradition? Outside of alumnus John Stockton, almost non-existent.
"And he was right at the time," Monson recalled recently. "He'd tell Mark and I all the time that Gonzaga is the worst job in the West Coast Conference."
Such a notion seems absurd now.
This week, Gonzaga played in its 27th consecutive NCAA Tournament, an active streak only eclipsed by Kansas and Michigan State, and won its 17th consecutive opening-round game. The Bulldogs have played for two national championships and gone 56-6 in the West Coast Conference tournament in 27 years since Few was tapped to become the head coach after Monson departed for a job in a bigger conference.
As Gonzaga has authored perhaps the most dominant run over a conference in the history of college basketball, Monson has received countless phone calls from coaches and administrators all asking for advice that once might have seemed unthinkable:How can we be the next Gonzaga?
"It's just such a unique, unbelievable story in sports, let alone basketball," said Bill Grier, a Colorado assistant who started his career on Gonzaga's staff and later coached WCC rival San Diego. "(You) have a little program that had never even been to the (NCAA) tournament til 1995 and then now look at what's been accomplished through Final Fours and championship games."
It is "a journey unlike any college program in the country," West Coast Conference commissioner Stu Jackson told NBC News.
As the Zags became a national brand synonymous with March, the rest of their WCC opponents did not. In a conference that often earned just one NCAA tournament berth per season, Loyola Marymount (1990), Portland (1996), Pepperdine (2002) and San Diego (2008) have gone a generation or more since their last appearance in March Madness. Santa Clara's tournament berth this year was its first since 1996.
Life in the WCC meant knowing "one of those (NCAA Tournament) bids are going to go to Gonzaga. They're going to go because they're just a powerhouse," said Gyno Pomare, a former San Diego big man from 2005-09. "But the only other way to get there is winning the tournament."
Led by Pomare and coached by Grier, San Diego won the conference tournament in 2008. San Francisco did in 1998, as well. But they're the outliers. Since 1998, Gonzaga won the conference tournament title, and the automatic berth to the NCAA Tournament that came with it, 22 times, and Saint Mary's four times. Gonzaga's tournament title earlier this month was its 12th in the last 14 years.
"You had some excellent coaches in that league, you know," said Phil Matthews, San Francisco's coach in 1998. "And it was a fight for second place."
"We haven't missed an NCAA Tournament and we won games in the NCAA Tournament so that's I think far and away the legacy that I'm most proud of," Few said after the latest conference-title win this month.
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But this summer, the long shadow it cast over the rest of the WCC will recede as Gonzaga leaves for the reconstituted Pac-12 Conference. If you were expecting the exit of a basketball behemoth to be cheered throughout the rest of a conference long starved for NCAA Tournament exposure, though, think again. Gonzaga's transformation into a perennial top-10 team brought relevance and revenue to the rest of the conference that won't easily, or quickly, be replaced.
"Being a competitor, no, I'm not happy they're leaving," said Pomare, who said playing Gonzaga twice each season provided two high-profile opportunities to impress the NCAA Tournament selection committee.
Jackson, the WCC Commissioner, acknowledged that the little school had become the WCC's "biggest brand" in basketball.
"Every member in the conference, both financially and from a brand standpoint in our conference as a whole, has benefited," he said. "And you know, we are sad to see them go. But we understand, and from a West Coast Conference perspective, we wish them nothing but the best.
"But that said, now comes opportunity. And I have gotten a sense, not just now, but over the past couple years, a sense that schools are trying to position themselves to take advantage of that opportunity."
Part of the reticence to cheer Gonzaga's departure is that while its success was bad news for many conference opponents on the court, it was also big business.
Teams that win games in the NCAA Tournament earn a "unit," a slice of tournament revenue, that goes to their conference and is later distributed among its members. Gonzaga's 47 wins in March Madness created a steady windfall.An analysisby the Associated Press in 2018 estimated Gonzaga had generated more than $51 million to the WCC since 1999. As another conference, the Mountain West, courting Gonzaga in 2018, the WCC changed its revenue-sharing rules to give schools that won multiple games in a given tournament a larger piece of the pie — a change that applied to any member, but applied in practice almost always to Gonzaga.
Since 2024, when Gonzaga announced its intention to leave for the Pac-12, half of each "unit" earned in the NCAA Tournament goes to the school that earned it, Jackson said; the other half goes to the conference, which distributes it among other members.
Monson believed Gonzaga's departure "had to mean disaster for the administration of these other schools, because the amount of money and recognition that Gonzaga brought that league is uncharted, unmatched," he said. "But for coaches, they had to be ecstatic — because the opportunity to go to the tournament was just never there."
Little about this would have been predicted in 1999, when Monson left Gonzaga to coach at Minnesota on the heels of leading the Bulldogs to a stunning run to the NCAA Tournament's Elite Eight. His reason for leaving, he said, was knowing that teams atop the competitive WCC rarely stayed there for long.
As Few took over in Spokane, though, the school didn't want its moment to slip away. It poured money into a new arena, scheduled games against blueblood opponents on neutral courts in front of national television audiences, and used that exposure to recruit around the globe. Few never left, creating an unmatched continuity.
"They realized before any other program that, 'We're going to put money and resources into basketball,'" said Matthews, the former San Francisco coach who saw it first-hand when his son played on Gonzaga's 2017 Final Four team.
Jackson, the WCC Commissioner, has worked as a head coach in college and the NBA, and later as a high-ranking NBA executive. This season marked only the fourth time the WCC had sent three teams to the NCAA Tournament. Still, he believes investments around the conference into basketball could keep it a multi-bid league despite the exit of Gonzaga, whose national presence helped opponents' strength of schedule.
Pepperdine is building an on-campus arena, San Francisco and San Diego have each built a new practice facility and Loyola Marymount has renovated its longtime arena.
"There's some good signs with having new members coupled with the increased level of investment commitment amongst our existing members," he said. "So, I think we're going to be OK."