Rise of the Zags: It's been 10 years since Gonzaga emerged from obscurity to become a college-basketball powerhouse

Ten years ago this month, the Gonzaga basketball team blew into KeyArena as everybody's favorite underdog. The average fan didn't know a lot about the Zags, just that he liked them. ¶ In a magical 48 hours, Gonzaga brushed aside scandal-plagued Minnesota and second-seeded Stanford, launching a run to the Elite Eight that didn't fizzle until it had taken eventual national champion Connecticut to the wire.

Context was impossible then; all we knew was that it was a great story, a school winning NCAA men's basketball tournament games for the first time. But it kept going, and kept going — Sweet 16 appearances in 2000 and 2001 — and pretty soon, what began as cute morphed into colossus.

Certainly, there are signs Gonzaga has leveled off, maybe reached a competitive peak that cannot be surpassed. For the first time in those 10 years, the Zags have been eliminated from the NCAA tournament in the opening round in consecutive seasons.

What can't be disputed is that Gonzaga has changed dramatically in 10 years, not only the profile of the basketball program but the university. Name a piece in this mosaic of evolution, and chances are it bears marks of the Zags' 10-year renaissance — national branding, revenues generated, TV desirability, school enrollment and, just possibly, a heightened (and often misguided) belief that it could happen at other schools.

"They've done a tremendous job," concedes Dick Davey, former coach at Santa Clara. "It's almost a freak of nature."

All because some guys got good at shooting a basketball inside a steel ring.

Follow the money

A lot of this story has to do with cash, and Gonzaga's capacity to make its success lucrative. You see it at every turn.

It's in the McCarthey Athletic Center, itself a monument to the Zags' ascent. It was built after those early-decade NCAA runs, a 6,000-seat solution to a cramped old gym that stifled recruiting gains and limited financial ones.

Inside the MAC is the office of Kris Kassel of IMG-College Sports. He's living, on-site evidence that Gonzaga has come a long way, having signed last July a contract with the international marketing firm that provides a broad-based, multimedia platform for all things Zag, including Internet and TV deals.

"They solicited us," said Gonzaga athletic director Mike Roth. "They're very selective."

IMG brokered Gonzaga's recently announced 10-year extension of a TV agreement with FSN and KHQ in Spokane.

Seemingly, the Zags get more face time on TV than Oprah. Thanks to the national profile built through 10 straight seasons of NCAA tournament appearances, they gave the West Coast Conference enough muscle to negotiate a pact with ESPN that helps put Gonzaga on either ESPN or ESPN2 11 times this year.

There are no figures announced for those deals, and as a private school, Gonzaga doesn't release them. The ESPN deal is more about exposure than money, but Zags officials will tell you it's all good.

"Our revenues [overall] are off the charts," says Zags associate AD Chris Standiford.

Some of that owes to Gonzaga's position in sports merchandising. The Zags ranked 56th in 2008 among Collegiate Licensing Company's 200 schools, a solid spot for a school that has no football program. You can walk into an airport apparel shop in Atlanta or Boston and find a T-shirt or hat with a Bulldog on it, and every sale drops more money into the Gonzaga kitty.

The TV contracts, in particular, illustrate the surge in Gonzaga's drawing power. Former WCC commissioner Mike Gilleran says that until several years ago, the league was reduced to paying for TV appearances. Now the property is desirable enough — when Gonzaga is playing, at least — that the league has a negotiating position.

"Once they [the Zags] took off, we were able to leverage conference games," Gilleran says.

Still, says WCC commissioner Jamie Zaninovich, who succeeded Gilleran a year ago, "their success is beyond financial. Equally important is their ability to create this brand identity of a national player. They've added a lot of value for the conference."

However one calculates it, it's a considerable sum — and by one measure, it's in multiple millions.

When the Zags began making a habit of the postseason in 1999, appearances and victories in the NCAA tournament were worth about $94,000 apiece, multiplied over a rolling six-year window. They're now worth more than $200,000.

In an attempt to calculate the cash Gonzaga has amassed for the WCC since 1999, The Times credited the Zags with 14 units. That's the number of times they've either won a game in the tournament (12) plus the years they have made it as an at-large entry (2). (In years they made it as an automatic qualifier, that first-round appearance didn't earn a unit in this tabulation, because the bid had to go to somebody in the WCC.)

Gonzaga won about $9.7 million for the league in those 10 years, minus a small amount, perhaps $20,000 per NCAA game, that the WCC kicked back to schools to allow for athletic department staffers' expenses. And its Sweet 16 in 2006 will accrue more money through 2011.

Unlike the Pac-10 Conference, which divides such money among its members after expenses, virtually all that cash goes to the WCC administration, which uses it against the cost of its salaried staffers and league events. Gilleran says the size of league staff has more than doubled since 1999, to nine.

Meanwhile, the rest of it goes to a "rainy day" reserve fund believed to be about $4 million to $5 million.

As its 10-year run gathered momentum and consistency, Gonzaga began to question whether the arrangement was equitable. It advanced a proposal to the league's presidents for a greater share of the proceeds, but that didn't fly.

"Does that sometimes frustrate the school bringing in the money?" Roth asked rhetorically. "Yeah, sure it does. That's part of living in this environment. No one holds a gun to our head to stay in the league, either."

Back on campus, the people in the Gonzaga admissions office stay busy. For the fall semester of 1999, there were 2,069 applicants for enrollment. The next year, applications jumped by 32 percent. And for the fall of 2008, there were 5,026 applicants.

Nobody is quite sure how much of that has to do with basketball. But everybody agrees it's a factor.

Trying to keep up

Once, the West Coast Conference was a paragon of consistency among coaches — Dan Fitzgerald at Gonzaga, Carroll Williams at Santa Clara, Jack Avina at Portland.

No more. Since Mark Few became Gonzaga coach in 1999, he has seen 22 coaches at the other seven schools, and there's more than a suspicion the Zags' success has turned up the pressure for other coaches.

"The stability is not the same in the conference," says Davey, who was ushered out two years ago. "Athletic directors and presidents felt everybody in the league should be Gonzaga."

Whether it's Gonzaga-related or not, there have been coaching changes ranging from the controversial to the bizarre.

At San Francisco late in 2007, athletic director Debra Gore-Mann announced that USF coach Jessie Evans had requested a "leave of absence" and, in what seemed like a publicity stunt, hired 71-year-old coach Eddie Sutton for the rest of the season to get his 800th victory. Evans disputes Gore-Mann's leave-of-absence claim and is suing the school.

At Pepperdine last year in midseason, coach Vance Walberg resigned for what were called "family reasons," but the school had been questioning players about Walberg's treatment of them.

At Loyola Marymount, newly hired Bill Bayno took a medical leave in November for what colleagues said were work-related and depression issues. He resigned in January, and successor Max Good told The Los Angeles Times, "He said he's not comfortable being a head coach."

Steve Aggers saw the reach of Gonzaga while coaching at Eastern Washington. Then he became one of those who tried his hand at Loyola Marymount.

"[The Zags] became the lead dog on the sled team," Aggers says. "Everybody's looking at them and saying, 'Why can't we do this?' "

Tom Asbury had a long history at Pepperdine, taking the Waves to the NCAA tournament three times in the early 1990s before he opted out for a job at Kansas State. He returned this season to Pepperdine to find a different landscape.

"Part of the reason we left was, we had pretty much run out of challenges," Asbury said.

Now he's got one. In recruiting, Asbury says, "we're not received as warmly as say, a Gonzaga, in our own town."

Evans, meanwhile, insists he didn't feel added pressure because of Gonzaga, but adds, "Everyone else is spending a quarter and Gonzaga is investing a dollar. At the end of the day, they just had so much more."

One ex-WCC coach says he wanted to try to recruit in Australia, but his administration turned him down. Too expensive.

What to do, then, when you're that lead dog and your conference is reaping the rewards of your labor? Gonzaga officials have kicked around the idea of a different league, but aside from the competitive imbalance in basketball, the WCC is perfect for it.

"We'd be a really good fit," Roth says facetiously, "for the Big East."

Tough road trips, those. But the Zags would take them as they usually travel — in booster-financed chartered planes, just one more way Gonzaga's world has changed in 10 years.

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