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It took some time for Gonzaga to reemerge as the clear-cut No. 1 men’s college basketball team in the country. But with Auburn’s loss last week, the Zags are back at the top — and they look highly unlikely to give up that position before the NCAA tournament.
Mark Few’s team started out the 2021-22 season at No. 1, held it for the first two weeks and then dropped games to Duke and Alabama in an eight-day stretch in late November and early December. They eventually regained the top spot in mid-January, but Auburn overtook them after its win over Kentucky.
Gonzaga now looks well-suited to stay atop the rankings for a long, long time. The Zags have not won a West Coast Conference game by fewer than 16 points, and their 10 league victories have come by an average of 30.1 points. Say whatever you want about WCC competition, but that’s a wildly impressive number. The WCC might get four NCAA tournament bids this season, and Gonzaga has won its four games against those other teams so far by an average of 22.8 points.
The scary thing about the Zags is that they’re continuing to improve, mostly because Chet Holmgren is still adapting and adjusting to the college game. Holmgren has been putting up otherworldly numbers over the past few weeks, while fellow five-star freshmen Nolan Hickman and Hunter Sallis give Mark Few a dimension off the bench he hasn’t had in the past.
I don’t see how Gonzaga loses before the NCAA tournament. Which means the Zags should once again enter the dance as the overall 1-seed.
For the first three months of the campaign, Rutgers had a few highlights but was mostly mired in a season of mediocrity likely to end in the NIT or a lesser postseason situation. There were nonconference losses to Lafayette and UMass and then three defeats in four games to Minnesota, Maryland and Northwestern in late January and early February. Two weeks later, though, Steve Pikiell’s team is suddenly squarely on the bubble.
The Scarlet Knights’ winning run started with a…
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Source : espn
