GLENDALE — The last time two Western teams played in the Final Four, Gonzaga forward Zach Collins was 5 months old.
That’s long enough.
“No disrespect to the East Coast, but they’ve been dominating this tournament as long as I can remember,” Collins said. “So to have two West Coast teams here is pretty amazing.”
Both Gonzaga, with its always diverse roster, and Oregon, with its three eastern Canadians, have some recruiting roots elsewhere.
But they both still have a majority of Western players on their roster, Oregon having eight of 14 players from west of the Rockies and Gonzaga 10 of 16. Fittingly, perhaps, their teams will stay out West to play national semifinal games at the University of Phoenix Stadium on Saturday. College basketball’s marquee event is being held in the West for the first time since 1995.
The West hasn’t had a single representative in the Final Four since UCLA made the last of three straight appearances in 2008, hasn’t had a champion since Arizona won it all in 1997 and hasn’t had two Final Four teams since both Utah and Stanford made it in 1998.
That year, the Utes knocked off the defending national champion UA in the Elite Eight, then reached the championship game before losing to Kentucky.
It was all a long, long time ago. Yet, in a way, many involved say nothing has really changed much.
To Gonzaga guard Jordan Mathews, it’s not that the West has been down or lacking more talent than normal, but because it just keeps missing.
Like the way Arizona did in the Elite Eights of 2005, 2011, 2014 and 2015. Or how Oregon did last season, knocking off Duke in the Sweet 16 but getting beaten by Oklahoma in the next round.
Mathews may have a better West Coast perspective on this than any player involved this weekend, too. He grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area, the son of former USF coach Phil Mathews, then played high school ball in Southern California, went back to the Bay Area to play three years at Cal and then arrived at Gonzaga this season via the grad transfer route.
“We’ve always had talent,” Mathews said. “West Coast teams have lost in the Elite Eight. Oregon lost last year and if they’d have won, we’d be talking about them. Arizona’s lost in the Elite Eight a couple of times, like those two teams that lost to Wisconsin. We would have had a West Coast team then.
“So it’s not like we’re that far off. We’ve just been one game away or two games away.”
But until last weekend, when Gonzaga bounced Xavier out of the West Region final and Oregon shocked Kansas in Kansas City, both teams faced questions about how far they’d really get.
Gonzaga was a No. 1 seed and was ranked No. 1 toward the end of the season, but it lost to BYU at home on Feb. 25, and plays in the lightly regarded West Coast Conference. The Zags have been a perennial tournament team since 1999, but never made it to the Final Four until this year.
And while Oregon had most of its key pieces back from that Elite Eight team a year ago, it lost matchup nightmare and rim protector Chris Boucher to a blown ACL in the Pac-12 Tournament.
Neither team appeared to have a whole lot of believers.
“Before we lost Chris, we had some respect,” Oregon center Jordan Bell said. “Once we lost him, some of it kind of fell off, people saying we weren’t the team we were gonna be. But once we got that together, people hopped back on the bandwagon.”
There may also be reasons both within and without the Western teams’ control that may have something to do with the perception. One is time zone, which has Pac-12 and other Western conference games routinely tipping off as folks in the East are going to sleep.
Even North Carolina big man Kennedy Meeks, a Charlotte native who says he has plenty of respect for Western players, won’t bother staying up late very often to watch West Coast games.
“Nah,” Meeks said. “I saw Washington a couple of times, but that’s about it.”
The way Meeks described it, maybe there’s a culture aspect involved here, too. If the West teams aren’t seen, maybe they also aren’t heard.
Meeks noticed that way back when he played travel ball across the country against teams from the West.
“Oh yeah, you could tell the difference,” he said. “Those guys are kind of quiet. They kind of let their game talk for themselves.”
To Gonzaga coach Mark Few, there’s a randomness to it all, too. Few said players’ individual decisions to stay or leave for the NBA early can have a big impact, while noting that recruiting talent can be cyclical.
As it turns out, exactly one-third of the McDonald’s All-Americans this week have roots in the West (if you count UA commit DeAndre Ayton, a Bahamas native who moved to San Diego in middle school) and four of the 18 signed players are headed for Pac-12 schools.
That could mean more seasons like this one, where Oregon, Arizona and UCLA made a power trio atop the conference.
“Arizona had a great team and UCLA was very explosive,” Oregon coach Dana Altman said. “It was a good year for our league.”
Combining the Pac-12 teams with Gonzaga gave the West four teams in the Top 10 of the Associated Press Top 25 — Gonzaga was second, Arizona fourth, UCLA eighth and Oregon ninth — and all four of them showed potential to make it to Phoenix.
“Certainly you could see this kind of big — funnel cloud or whatever you want to call it — forming early in the year,” Few said. “You could see Arizona was going to be really good. I was predicting UCLA was going to be really good because I thought people didn’t realize how old they were, and I thought Lonzo (Ball) was kind of the last piece.
“I think everybody knew Oregon was going to have a good year and then the way it started happening for us, … you got into December and January, and it was like, ‘Wow, there’s some really good teams out West.’”
So good that two of them will still be playing in April.
