And now, it comes down to two
This North Carolina-Gonzaga matchup could be one for the ages
As the dust settled Saturday night inside University of Phoenix Stadium, 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 school that did, appearing in its first championship game. It will be North Carolina, the program of Dean and M.J., 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 Gamecocks coach who has spent 11 years combined as a head coach in the Big 12 and SEC.
“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 versus Goliath, it’s Goliath versus Goliath.
The real storyline is so much better, anyway. It’s not every year that the best two teams play for the title. You could make an argument for Kansas or Kentucky or Villanova or Duke, but over the course of the season, no teams have impressed more than Gonzaga and Carolina.
“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 start three juniors and two seniors. They have rebounding muscle in Kennedy Meeks and Isaiah Hicks, more than enough scoring punch from Justin Jackson and Joel Berry II and an intelligent Swiss Army knife in Pinson. They have a powerful singularity of purpose, having reached the title game last season and lost on Kris Jenkins’s last-second three-pointer.
“We have another shot,” Pinson said. “We dreamed about this every day since that game. That shot that Kris made against us, I think about it every day. Now we get another shot to make up for it.”
Since November, Gonzaga has accomplished more than any team in the United States. The Bulldogs — which feature Tsawwassen guard Dustin Triano as a bench option — 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 No. 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 seven-foot freshman might be playing in the NBA this time next year. He is an elite talent, and the Zags wield him only in spurts. He has the confidence and 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 and six blocks in 23 minutes. The combination of mountains Przemek Karnowski and Collins, both of whom have mastered the defensive concept of verticality, forms an effective wall in the low block.
“We always play inside out,” Williams-Goss said. “We have four really talented bigs. They’re all very different and can bring us something different on a given night. I just think that’s a credit to our balance. We feel confident, no matter who we go up against, that our bigs are going to deliver for us.”
North Carolina, of course, will not be daunted by Gonzaga’s size. Meeks has devoured rebounds all tournament, the 14 boards he grabbed Saturday against Oregon bringing his tournament total to 59. If Hicks can avoid foul trouble — which is a long shot — he’ll be just as hard to keep off the glass.
Outside the paint, the matchups will be equally magnificent. Williams-Goss and Jackson are both admirable in their performance and demeanour, both smooth operators who seemingly know only how to make the right play. Berry and Josh Perkins will hound one another relentlessly. It’s going to be fantastic, and it will be a fair fight.