Today was the West Coast Conference media day, a joint affair with the Mountain West Conference, which considering the addition of Oregon State and Washington State (the Pac 2) to the WCC, and considering the overall pillaging of the MWC by the Pac 2 earlier this fall, it had to be an entertaining affair of strong handshakes backed by fake smiles.
In general, the WCC Media Day isn’t an exciting news day for Gonzaga fans. We get to see how coaches think the middle to the bottom of the conference is going to shake out and who might be the No. 3 team after the often required order of Gonzaga at No. 1 and Saint Mary’s at No. 2.
This year, not much was different, except for one incredibly key fact.
The number one, next to San Francisco, seemingly looks like it was a typo. But it isn’t, because 9+1+1 does in fact equal 11. In the preseason poll, coaches understandably cannot vote for their own team. Therefore, Gonzaga is never a unanimous pick, but getting nine first-place votes was pretty much it. Mark Few has most likely been naming Saint Mary’s as No. 1 for the past decade.
So that begs the question: Which WCC coach is currently mentally unfit for their job in which they envision the scenario that the San Francisco Dons, a good team without a doubt, are going to win the conference over the Gonzaga Bulldogs, a team currently labelled with Final Four or Bust written all over the team bus windows.
This is almost as egregious as Gonzaga not receiving two votes in the preseason AP Poll despite landing overall at No. 6.
In that case, one of the two voters copped to the expected reason–brain fart. He would hardly be the first AP voter to inexplicably leave someone off the list or to vote for the wrong team.
The media day poll is a bit different. There are only 11 teams to choose from, and they are all in your conference. Presumably, if you are one of the eight other long-time WCC members, you haven’t forgotten about Gonzaga yet.
It would have been crazy still, but at least a little bit more justifiable, if it ended up as two first-place votes for Saint Mary’s. Or even one first-place vote for Santa Clara. But one first-place vote for the overall fourth-place team?! What are we even doing here?!
In my hot-takes column for the season I said Gonzaga will not run the table solely because that is hard to do. I’d like to take that back now because someone in the WCC is giving this squad disrespect for reasons that are unbeknownst to anyone.
The WCC Preseason Poll has usually been pretty vanilla compared to its much more wild counterpart in the end of season poll, but this world gets more crazy and chaotic every day so I guess we shouldn’t be surprised.