Yesterday, Gonzaga and Alabama announced a…well, kind of a home-and-home. It’s technically a neutral-and-neutral, but this year’s game will be in Seattle and next year’s will be in Birmingham.
To be fair, the game in Seattle will be upwards of a four-hour drive if the Zags choose to drive (I would imagine they will not, but I’m also no expert on collegiate athletic transportation). This isn’t on Gonzaga’s doorstep. But at the same time, they’ll have a medium-sized home-crowd advantage, which, as Connor Hope of Heat Check pointed out, will not be reflected on their team sheet, nor, I believe, in their SOR or NET or KPI (we’ll see about KenPom, which has a semi-home feature, but I don’t know whether that’s a mileage threshold or a judgment call and if it’s mileage, I don’t know whether it changes out west where the schools get sparser). The next year, Alabama will get that benefit, with the home-court advantage netting out evenly and each team basically getting a cushion in which if their opponent winds up between 36th and 50th in NET, the “home” game in the series will still be a Quadrant I game.
I’m not convinced this is the real motivation as much as Gonzaga wants to engage their alumni base in Seattle, Alabama wants to engage their alumni base in Birmingham, and both want to play a premier opponent in what will be one of the biggest nonconference games of the season, something that will get both programs attention, TV viewership, experience, and, in Gonzaga’s case, a much-boosted strength of schedule number.
This last piece is important, and it’s why while I’m guessing Gonzaga’s saying, “Well yeah, sure, that Q1/Q2 cushion’s nice but really we just wanted a game in Seattle and were willing to play in Birmingham to get it,” there’s a reason they aren’t playing Portland State.
In 2016, Gonzaga won the WCC Tournament. They beat Saint Mary’s in the championship game, avenging two prior losses. The NCAA was still using RPI then, and Gonzaga ranked just 45th in the metric, though they were 27th in KenPom (at least at the time of their first tournament game). The WCC did a good job of scheduling that year—Gonzaga’s opponents had the 7th-best nonconference strength of schedule by the NCAA’s measurement—but it wasn’t enough to get Gonzaga’s own overall schedule into the top 100, and with their best win a neutral-court victory over eventual nine-seed UConn and home losses to NIT-bound BYU and postseason non-participant UCLA, the Zags ended up with just an 11-seed, with little benefit given above RPI’s low impression of them.
Since that season (in which Gonzaga did go on to the Sweet Sixteen), the Zags’ strength of schedule hasn’t improved all that much. Even their nonconference strength of schedule wasn’t in the top 40 this year in the metric the committee was given. That’s surprising. It surprised me. Because one of my lasting memories of the 2020-21 college basketball season was Gonzaga’s willingness to play anyone. It turns out that even if you play Kansas, and Iowa, and Virginia, and West Virginia, and even Auburn, who would’ve spent some time around the bubble conversation if they hadn’t ineligibled themselves, you can pull your numbers in a poor direction by hosting Northwestern State twice and Northern Arizona and Dixie State each once in a nine-day span. Was Gonzaga’s strength of schedule great? No. But it was good enough to get the committee looking past the number.
One of the secrets about the selection committee is that their rules don’t make sense. The importance of outliers is multiplied many times more than would be the case were one to build an objective, reasonable formula (look at NC State missing the tournament due to their 353rd-ranked nonconference strength of schedule in 2019, or Michigan State making the tournament this year because the three times they showed up in the regular season were given vastly more weight than the times they got wrecked by Northwestern and Minnesota). Perception is key. And the end result of this is that it doesn’t matter how good your nonconference strength of schedule is so long as you don’t have a gaudily bad number and, if you play in a mid-major conference, you play enough prominent nonconference games that the committee’s instinctive reaction is, “those guys really challenged themselves,” even if you spaced out the games strategically and gave yourself gimmes and really only played one top-two seed in the regular season the way it all worked out.
In the end, this is perfect for Gonzaga’s basketball program. They get the big televised games. They get the measuring sticks (this shouldn’t be understated—Gonzaga did test themselves in the early going, which strength of schedule metrics don’t adequately assess, an example of how they’re imperfect themselves, which is part of why they’re so easy to selectively use). They get to be a national brand yet an outsider—a Notre Dame on the hardwood. That’s the real motivation. But it dovetails nicely with making sure what happened in 2016 never happens again. Gonzaga will take both.
