Best two NCAA teams got it done

North Carolina, Gonzaga will be a tilt of titans

As the dust settled Saturday night, an easy storyline emerged. Monday night’s U.S. college men’s basketball national championship will pit a natural underdog against a towering blueblood.

It will be Gonzaga out of the mid-major West Coast Conference, the little-schoolthat-did, appearing in its first championship game. It will be North Carolina, the program of Dean and MJ, of 20 Final Fours and five national championships.

You will hear the theme constantly until game time. And it will be woefully wrong.

Ask Frank Martin, the South Carolina coach who has spent 11 years combined as a head coach in the Big 12 and SEC, whose Gamecocks gave Gonzaga everything it could handle and still exited the tournament.

“It’s not 1997 anymore,” Martin said. “They were Cinderella and all that pretty stuff in ’97. They’ve been in this thing for 20 consecutive years. They’re as high-major as high-major can get.”

Martin’s memory is a hair off — it was 1999 when Gonzaga marched to the Elite Eight and began its run of 19 consecutive NCAA tournaments. But he’s exactly right. The title is not David vs. Goliath. It’s Goliath vs. Goliath.

“The two best teams are the two left standing,” North Carolina assistant Sean May said.

“It’s going to be, in my opinion, the two best teams in the nation,” North Carolina’s Theo Pinson said.

Since November, many experts formed the consensus that North Carolina possessed more talent than any team in the country. The Tar Heels have rebounding muscle in Kennedy Meeks and Isaiah Hicks, scoring punch from Justin Jackson and Joel Berry II and an intelligent Swiss army knife in Pinson. They have a singularity of purpose, having reached the title game last season and lost on Kris Jenkins’s last-second threepointer.

Since November, Gonzaga plowed through a challenging non-conference schedule, dominated the WCC and will arrive Monday night with a 37-1 record. They spent four weeks ranked No. 1. They play eight or nine players, and those who come off the bench are enormous and offer scant drop-off. They are light years from a fluke, having been a 1 or 2 seed in three of the past five NCAA tournaments.

It takes only one piece of evidence to prove Gonzaga’s worthiness as a powerhouse. Zach Collins decided to play there, and he comes off the bench. The 7-foot freshman is an elite talent, and the Zags wield him only in spurts. He has the skills to swing a game, and he did so Saturday night.

In the locker-room before the game, Collins told Nigel Williams-Goss, his roommate, “I wouldn’t want to be playing against me today.” Then he backed it up. Collins came off the bench to produce this staggering line: 14 points, 13 rebounds, six blocks in 23 minutes. The combination of mountains Przemek Karnowski and Collins forms an effective wall.

It’s going to be fantastic, and it will be a fair fight. The Gonzaga Bulldogs celebrate after defeating the South Carolina Gamecocks 77-73 in the NCAA men’s Final Four Semifinal at the University of Phoenix Stadium on Saturday.