Final thoughts on 2020-21 season for Gonzaga Basketball

Gonzaga Basketball lost the National Championship game to Baylor Monday night 86-70 and ruined their perfect season. I wanted to wait a couple of days for the game to pass for me to write about my thoughts on the year but this team had an incredible season.

I have been a Gonzaga fan for years, my older brother who’s nine years older than me graduated from Gonzaga. I remember when I was in 4th grade it was his first year as a student witch was also the last year my favorite basketball team the Sonics were in town.

It was an easy transition for me, I remember running around my house when Demetri Goodson hit the layup against Western Kentucky in 2009, the disappointment against Wichita State in 2013, and freaking out when Jordan Matthews hit the shot against West Virginia in 2017. But going from that amazing emotional UCLA game to the Baylor game was just tough.

I honestly thought this was the year for Gonzaga. Baylor is a tremendous team that probably would have gone undefeated without their Covid pause. We had two historically great teams this year. Baylor just happened to be better, a bad matchup for the Bulldogs, and happened to play very well when the Zags played poorly. Baylor is an awesome team that deserves all the credit in the world. Gonzaga is a great program and it would be fantastic for them to get their title.

But winning six games in a row in a single-elimination tourney is hard. They have won five games twice and were very close to winning a Tittle in 2017. I don’t understand the WCC doesn’t prepare the Zags for the March argument. They are the only team in college basketball with six straight Sweet 16’s, 4 out of the last 6 years they have made the Elite 8 and have played for the title in 2 of the last 4 years. Being consistently a very good program is hard and an impressive thing to do.

The Slipper Still Fits wrote an excellent article. They mentioned that Gonzaga historically meets their seed expectation at top seed and overachieves as a lower seed. I think the notion that the Zags choke in the tournament every year is ridiculous. If you read that article, you see that the Zags do exactly what they are supposed to do in the tournament.

To me, choking means blowing a huge lead or missing all your free throws at the end of the game. It undervalues the teams like Baylor and Texas Tech from 2019. Every single team in the NCAA tournament is good, it is extremely hard to win multiple games in the tourney. Only one team when’s the title and a handful of other teams there’s disappointment every year. A 1 seed losing to a 1 seed are top 4 teams entering the tourney.

When a top 4 team loses to a top 4 team in the regular season nobody cares. Both teams are great and someone has to lose. If a 1 seed loses to a 3 seed witch again is a top 12 team. It doesn’t say anything about the 1 seed they just happened to lose and sometimes a top 4 team in the country just loses to a top 12 team.

Overall, Gonzaga is an incredible program, and since the 2015-2016 season are 40-13 against Power 6 teams. Going from a school that almost had to shut down the school and leave division 1 athletics before 1998-1999 when they started their run to a National Title contender every year is incredible. Gonzaga is a top 10 team every year and is a shoo-in to go far in the tourney. Just because they don’t have a championship doesn’t take anything away from them.

The championship would certainly add something but if anything it shows how hard it is to win a championship. Coach K didn’t win a title until his third National Championship game and Dean Smith didn’t until his 4th. Gonzaga also has the most amount of wins of any team in the tournament in the last six years.

It’s a horrible way for Corey Kispert and Jalen Suggs’s careers to end. Gonzaga was 1 win away from being the first team to win the Tittle undefeated since 1976. The Zags went 31-1, 29 of their wins were by double-digits and beat the 2,3,4,5,6,8 seed’s in their bracket and a 6 seed BYU three times all by double digits. Gonzaga was as good as we thought they were in just that Baylor is one of the best teams ever as and we didn’t realize how good Baylor was.

Gonzaga will be back, the way the Zags have recruited the last few years they aren’t going anywhere and will continue to be elite. The staff does a phenomenal job at developing their players and with most likely having Drew Timme, Hunter Sallis, and Chet Holmgren next year the Zags will be very good once again.