What Mark Few said after Gonzaga's NCAA Tournament win over Kansas

SALT LAKE CITY - Just about a month ago, there was talk the Gonzaga Bulldogs wouldn’t be in the 2024 NCAA Tournament.

As Kansas coach Bill Self said, those takes seem pretty ridiculous right now.

The fifth-seeded Zags (27-7, 14-2 WCC) advanced to their ninth-straight Sweet 16 with a dominant 89-68 victory over the fourth-seeded Kansas Jayhawks (23-11, 10-9 Big 12) on Saturday in Salt Lake City, Utah.

“Just an awesome performance by these guys and the rest of the guys in the locker room, especially that second half of defense,” said Gonzaga coach Mark Few. “We talked at halftime. We had to bear down here and start getting some stops. Our offense was clicking really, really well.”

Here’s more of what Few had to say after the win:

On the difficulty of making nine-straight Sweet 16 appearances:

“It’s always hard. I think that’s what people need to understand. Sometimes you gotta just take a step back. Whether it’s making -- I think we’ve been to 26 straight [NCAA Tournaments]. I mean, the thing that people don’t realize, we qualified for the COVID year. We won our tournament and we’re sitting around waiting to see where we were sent.

“So we were in that tournament. We didn’t need help with at-larges or anything. But, yeah, the Sweet 16 thing, we don’t take it for granted at all. I’ll say it again. I think it’s the greatest sporting event in the entire world. It’s so exciting and so, just, awesome to be a part of it.”

On his team’s alarm level in December:

“I mean, it wasn’t crazy. It was just, hey, listen, if we don’t get going and playing better on both ends of the floor and figure this thing out, then it’s probably not going to happen. We’ve got to figure this thing out. We did, and we did it probably in the hardest of ways, right?”

“I mean, we went on the road and won at Rupp, which is not an easy place to do that. Obviously, at Saint Mary’s. And San Francisco, I think, this a heck of a team. They’re good enough to play in this NCAA Tournament. For us to beat that team three times was quite a feat also.”

“So we knew we had to finish strong. We did that. We’ve just always impressed upon them, you know, we get in this thing, we know how to win in this thing. This is not a new thing for our program, for the staff and for the players that are in here. I think they really bought into that and believed that. Especially the new ones.”