Match made in hoops heaven
Baylor, Gonzaga have been at the top past two seasons and now get to see who is the best
Baylor coach Scott Drew on Easter recounted a sweet story with a brisk ending concerning Gonzaga coach Mark Few and the NCAA Tournament. Not only are the gloves off for Baylor vs. Gonzaga in the national title game on Monday night, but the hands are firmly unfolded.
“We have a great relationship, and the interesting thing is we started texting each other and saying a prayer for each other’s teams before games during the tournament,” Drew said with a grin. “We said we’d do that all the way up to the championship. … I guess he won’t get that prayer or text before this one.”
The devout Drew’s lack of an invocation for his colleague bares the seriousness of the Bears-Zags showdown: When the confetti starts dropping from the heavens late Monday, either Baylor (27-2) or fellow No. 1 seed Gonzaga (31-0) will have won a first national title.
“This is perfect how it’s worked out,” Drew said of college basketball’s two best teams throughout the season meeting for a championship in Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.
Things appeared far from perfect for both programs in early December, when Gonzaga abruptly backed out of a ballyhooed meeting with the Bears because of COVID-19 issues within the Zags program. The longtime fishing buddies tried rescheduling at a neutral site, to no avail.
“We looked at numerous places,” Few said before adding with a laugh, “Scott tried throwing out Fort Worth or something like that, and I wasn’t too keen on that.”
Fort Worth is 90 miles from Waco, and close to 1,900 miles from Spokane, Wash. The regular-season matchup never came to be, perhaps for the best considering the freshness of Monday’s much-anticipated showdown.
“We tried and tried (to
reschedule), and once we got into the first or second week of January, it was looking like the Big 12 schedule already had cancelations, and it was going to be hard to slide in a nonleague game,” Few said. “By the time we got to midJanuary it was looking pretty futile. So we said, ‘Let’s do everything we can to make it all the way to this point.’ It’s pretty amazing that we both did.
“We had our little futile human plans, but God always has a plan and as is usually the case His plan is better than yours. It turned out this scenario is the best you could possibly imagine for college basketball in general, and even, heck, sports in America.”
Baylor vs. Gonzaga will mark the third time since the NCAA Tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985 (and to 68 a decade ago) that the preseason No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the Associated Press poll have
met in the championship game. The others are Duke and Connecticut in 1999 and Arizona and Duke in 2001.
“We didn’t get to play this game in December, and now we get to see them as they play their best ball and we play our best ball,” Baylor guard Davion Mitchell said. “It’s going to be a really fun game.”
Should the Bears prevail on Monday, they will achieve multiple firsts: They are 0-5 against Gonzaga, 0-8 against a No. 1ranked team and 0-3 against a No. 1 seed.
“The two most deserving teams of the past two years are going to meet in the NCAA championship game,” Gonzaga guard Joel Ayayi said.
A year ago the NCAA Tournament was canceled because of the burgeoning global pandemic, a season in which Baylor and Gonzaga
both believed they were primed to win a first national title.
“God always has a plan,” Drew said of the two sides finally meeting for all the marbles. “You’ve got a great game in store, hopefully. In a 40-minute game anything can happen, and both teams have really handled the expectations and pressure. Players want to play against the best, and Gonzaga has definitely been the best this year as far as not having been beaten yet.”
The Bears, whose trio of starting guards is considered the nation’s best, have won four of their five NCAA Tournament games by double digits, including 78-59 over the University of Houston on Saturday.
They’ve won the five games by an average of 15 points, and their closest call to date was a nine-point victory over No. 3 seed Arkansas
in the Elite Eight.
Meantime Gonzaga, in wiping its collective brow, needed overtime to defeat UCLA 93-90 on guard Jalen Suggs’ long-range bank-in at the buzzer late Saturday.
“We go from the euphoric high of that, to waking up (Easter) morning to the daunting task of trying to prepare for an excellent Baylor team I’ve been marveling at for the last two years,” said Few, in his 22nd season guiding Gonzaga. “They’re solid on both sides of the ball.”
Ayayi added that while some things are different among the two programs in the four months since they were supposed to first play, one thing clearly is not.
“They’re still a high-level team,” Ayayi said of the Bears. “That didn’t change.”