WCC programs feel "Zag Envy"

Jessie Evans says he got word late last month: Be in a Dec. 26 meeting with his athletic director at the University of San Francisco, Debi Gore-Mann, at 8:30 a.m.

Evans, the fourth-year basketball coach at USF, sensed it probably wasn't good news. Still, he was surprised.

"She gave me an ultimatum," Evans said Wednesday. " 'You can either take a leave of absence, or get terminated for just cause.'

"She was adamant. They were having a 4 o'clock press conference. I was in her office less than five minutes. By 9:15 or so, it's on the [ESPN] crawl: Eddie Sutton's taking my job."

Five minutes. That's hardly even enough time to say "Happy holidays."

Bill Grier, the first-year coach at San Diego and longtime assistant at Gonzaga, used to have a term for the phenomenon: "Zag Envy." While it's hard to connect the dots directly from the mess at USF to Gonzaga, or from the fiasco at Pepperdine last week to the Zags, there's a growing body of evidence that Gonzaga is casting an undue shadow on the rest of the West Coast Conference.

At Pepperdine, second-year coach Vance Walberg is out after an implosion in which Waves officials acknowledge they questioned players about his motivational tactics, including an incident last year in which he ordered a player he considered petulant to suck his thumb.

The ethics of the USF dispute grew murkier when Sutton and Gore-Mann produced far different stories about when they first discussed bringing the 71-year-old longtime coach out of retirement so he could get the two victories needed to push him over No. 800.

These are uneasy times in the WCC, whose membership has been the third-most stable in the nation, trailing only the Ivy League and Pac-10. Four of the eight WCC schools have changed coaches in the past 10 months, the last two in volatile fashion.

The only coach in the league in a settled program outside of Gonzaga is Randy Bennett of St. Mary's, and he doesn't like what he sees.

"A lot of people are changing to change," Bennett said the other day. "I haven't seen this in our league. It's not good for our league."

The Zags influence is not widely acknowledged in the WCC, but Bennett concedes its existence.

Every school in the league has made a coaching change in the past three years, save for Gonzaga, with apparent lifer Mark Few, and St. Mary's, which has been to one NCAA tournament in Bennett's time and appears headed for another.

Gonzaga is shooting for its 10th straight NCAA appearance. The Zags are consistently on ESPN, they're scheduling reciprocal games with programs like Connecticut, Memphis and Tennessee, and they're reaping money for the conference.

Naturally, everybody wants it.

"I don't know if anybody has done it better, out of a mid-major [conference]," Bennett says. "I don't know if anybody has done it better, period, in college basketball, as far as maximizing a program.

"But it took time."

Bill Hogan, the athletic director at Seattle University, had the same job at USF until 2006 and hired Evans, who was 45-57 at USF. Hogan points to a new wave of athletic directors without old perspectives that replaced veterans like Carroll Williams at Santa Clara.

"Maybe as a new athletic director, Gonzaga is always looming; they're really good," says Hogan. "You know what? They created their advantages. I think that's what everybody has to do in the West. You have to find out what your niche is. You can't copy what they did."

Bingo. Most WCC cities are in warmer weather, in or near pro sports, and playing in lesser arenas. Gonzaga is just different.

"There's almost a uniqueness to this place," said Grier on his first return to Spokane as San Diego's coach. "We [in San Diego] don't have the students as close to campus. Heck, down there, I'd think about living at the beach, too.

"You have that, and you have a one-horse town here. You don't have any professional teams, and you don't have any other schools in Spokane. They're the show."

Gore-Mann downplays the Gonzaga factor, saying she sees USF as being in "such a different environment, an urban campus with a very heavy pro market."

"There isn't, so far as I can tell, a resentment or pressure to catch up," Gore-Mann says. "It's, 'Wow, isn't this wonderful for all of us?' "

Not all WCC administrators are looking at it so beatifically. As Bennett says, the typical four-year coaching commitment is a small window for playing catchup with a program that was trending upward even before it became nationally known with the Elite Eight run of 1999. The Zags had won 20 games in five of the previous seven years.

Says Grier, "I don't think anybody understands how long it took to get this thing to this level."

Back to the USF melodrama: Evans says he turned over Gore-Mann's ultimatum to his agent at IMG, choosing neither of her options. In an e-mail Wednesday, Gore-Mann declined to discuss specifics of Evans' version of events. The school continues to refer to Evans' departure as a leave of absence.

In any case, outside of St. Mary's, there's not a lot of evidence many administrators in the WCC have enough patience or perspective to mount a serious threat to Gonzaga.

Rim shots

• Tonight, IUPUI's Ron Hunter coaches barefoot in a Summit League game against Oakland to bring attention to Samaritan's Feet, a charity dedicated to providing shoes for the world's children without them.

• Not since 1988 has anybody won the Ivy League other than Penn or Princeton, but the two are a combined 7-23 this year. Cornell (9-5), which last did it 20 years ago, looks like the best bet.

Bud Withers: 206-464-8281 or bwithers@seattletimes.com