Will Gonzaga ever break through in men's NCAA Tournament?

There is a very fine line between good and great in sports. The Gonzaga Bulldogs keep finding themselves on the wrong side of that line. It happened again with their 2025-26 season, which came to an end on Saturday with a 74-68 loss to Texas. 

It is the second year in a row Gonzaga has failed to get out of the round of 32, and it leaves the program in a very familiar place.

Very good. But not quite great. 

And it has to be getting frustrating because there is no easy fix to the problem.

Gonzaga just can not quite break through to the NCAA's elite

This is not meant to be a criticism of Gonzaga, an objectively good basketball program that is always a contender, always a tournament team, and always gives its fans a reason to pay attention and get excited.

Every year, you know they are going to be a top-15 and potentially top-10 program.

You know they are going to be in the tournament, and probably with a very high seed.

You also know it will probably end in disappointment, and probably earlier than anybody associated with the program wants it to end. 

In his two-and-a-half decades running the program, Mark Few has done a masterful job in turning a mid-major program in Spokane, Washington, into a consistently relevant program. 

This is by no means a "fire the coach" situation. Because he has not done anything to warrant being fired, and doing so would be an act of lunacy or arrogance on the part of the program. 

There are only a handful of coaches in the country that are better, and of the established ones that are better, the chances that any of them are going to choose Gonzaga over the other blue blood programs seem like a long shot. 

Any young, up-and-coming coach is far from a guarantee to do better than Few, and odds are they would do worse. Perhaps significantly so.

Making a change is also not something that seems to be on the horizon, unless it is that Few decides to walk away. 

But how does he, and the program itself, break through? 

They have been close. They played in two national championship games in 2017 and 2021. They were in the Elite Eight as recently as 2023. It's not like they have not made extremely deep runs.

The unfortunate reality is that those deep runs, including the two national championship games, were in a very different era of college basketball. It was before the transfer portal had really taken over the way it has now, and before NIL became a thing. It was a little easier for a really good mid-major to compete on the biggest stage. It was a little easier for a team that did not have the budget of a Kansas, or Duke, or Kentucky to make consistently deep runs. 

Even in Saturday's game, Gonzaga, a No. 3 seed, losing to a No. 11 seed seems like a huge upset in the traditional way of thinking about college basketball and the NCAA tournament. But Texas is hardly a Cinderella program, and given the amount of money the two programs have to spend (and do spend), it is hard to call it a true upset. It is just the reality of big-time college sports in 2026. 

Gonzaga is very good. It is consistently very good. There are hundreds of college basketball programs across the country that would love to be where they have been over the past 25-plus seasons. But they just can not break through from being very good to being truly great. It is hard to see how that changes anytime soon.