By Trevor Roughan
The end of the 2023 UCLA men’s basketball team’s season felt all too familiar. A great Bruins squad, led by Jaime Jaquez Jr., lost a late-March contest in heartbreaking fashion to the Gonzaga Bulldogs yet again. Most remember Jalen Suggs’s heroics in 2021 to advance Gonzaga past UCLA to the championship game, but did you know that these two teams met in the 2015 tournament as well?
Przemek Karnowski walked so Drew Timme could run. The Polish big man’s physical, offensively dominant style of play was too much for the Bruins in this one, scoring 18 points and nine rebounds en route to a 74-62 victory in the Sweet 16. Including this 2015 matchup, Gonzaga owns a 5-1 record against UCLA since the 2014-2015 season, going 3-0 versus the Bruins in March. Gone are the days when UCLA could be considered the unquestioned leader of college basketball on the west coast. Somehow, someway, a small school from the WCC has snatched that title in recent years.
Gonzaga’s sudden relevance in college basketball over the past two decades can be attributed in part to its legendary head coach, Mark Few. Prior to Few’s takeover in 1999, Gonzaga had only qualified for the big dance once in 1995. As a 14 seed, under head coach, Dan Monson, the Bulldogs were blown out by a superior Maryland team. When Few was handed the reigns four years later, he found immediate success and hasn’t looked back since.
In his first season as head coach, Few’s team reached the Elite 8 as a 10 seed. Gonzaga has made it to the NCAA Tournament every year of the Few era, winning its way to the Sweet 16 every season from 2015-2023. This 24-year streak of attending the big dance is the third-longest among all D1 men’s teams, only behind powerhouse programs like Kansas and Michigan St.
Contrarily, UCLA has attended the NCAA tournament sixteen times in that same time span. Though nothing to sneeze at, UCLA’s play over the past two decades does not quite compare to the consistency of Gonzaga’s. The opportunity to ever compare these teams in a vacuum likely seemed impossible before the twenty-first century. UCLA once housed the most dominant men’s college basketball team of all time, led by John Wooden, while Gonzaga didn’t win a game in March until 1999. No one knows what the next several decades will look like for both pristine programs, but it is an objective truth that Gonzaga is currently the team to beat out west.
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