Gonzaga vs. UCLA - two West Coast basketball powers - could soon be Big 12 vs. Big Ten matchup
West Coast college basketball powers UCLA and Gonzaga are meeting in the NCAA Tournament on Thursday night in Las Vegas. The Bruins won the Pac-12 this season and the Bulldogs won the West Coast Conference.
Beginning as soon as 2024, this could be a matchup of Big Ten vs. Big 12.
UCLA is officially moving to the Big Ten Conference in 2024. Gonzaga has been in active discussions with the Big 12 for several months.
Gonzaga has engaged in at least two prior talks with the Big 12, which recently weighed the Zags' candidacy as a basketball-only program during meetings between conference administrators in early February.
The link between Gonzaga and the Big 12 is so strong, that last week The Athletic published a story titled "How would Gonzaga fare in the Big 12? Let’s hear from a couple of potential future rivals."
Moving to a bigger conference with a much larger television deal and national footprint would be a financial boon for Gonzaga. But what about the product on the basketball court? The Bulldogs have the most men's NCAA Tournament wins of any program since 2017 with 19. The team has made eight consecutive trips to the Sweet 16. They're doing just fine.
This year, 11 different conferences are represented in the Sweet 16. Five of those are mid-majors. The gap between the top teams outside of the Power-6 and the top teams in the premier conferences has never been smaller.
Ahead of Gonzaga's Sweet 16 showdown with UCLA, Bulldogs head coach Mark Few was asked about the significance of five mid-major teams advancing to the second weekend of the tournament and whether it's as important as it once was to be in a power basketball conference.
"I think it tells you there's a lot of really, really good teams out there," Few said. "And I think with everything that's going on, from really, really good players leaving early to this COVID-year stuff where it seems like 27-year-olds are playing now, that definitely everything is shrinking to the mean. But when you're out there playing these games, you definitely feel it. And you feel how close we all are. And I think that's what makes an accomplishment like these eight Sweet 16s in a row even more remarkable."
In an era of college basketball that's "shrinking to the mean," it's fascinating that now is the right time for Gonzaga to potentially leave the West Coast Conference.
“We’ve been able to survive and prosper in the environment where we’ve been, how we’ve been doing it. But we can’t be naive to how much is changing around us, and (we have to) be prepared to (discern) that path forward," Gonzaga AD Chris Standiford told The Athletic's Brian Hamilton.
