Baylor Bears Triumphant Over Formerly Undefeated Gonzaga Bulldogs

Baylor Bears Triumphant Over Formerly Undefeated Gonzaga Bulldogs, 2021

    I was prepared for the Dogs to go undefeated and match the 1976 Indiana Hoosiers, a home town team that I was too young to appreciate when it happened. I was ready to move on, and let the Zags have that greatness attached, taking from my home state of Indiana and my alma mater.

 

    But the Bears showed up and played better. Quite a bit better than their previously perfect foes. I think, as many others, that the Saturday night UCLA game took some out of them, the West Coast Conference darlings of the last 20 or so years. The WCC more recently added my Utah alma mater Brigham Young as an opponent, which has raised the level of play in this smaller Catholic dominated league; Gonzaga may have been lagging for the championship last night due to a scramble and classic game with another former school of mine, UCLA. Meanwhile the Baylor Coach, Scott Drew, comes from the Hoosier state and foiled the dandies of Spokane, Washington.

 

    Bob Knight's Hoosiers remain the perfect team from the Bicentennial, 45 years ago; Gonzaga joins Larry Bird's 1979 Indiana Sycamores as the last perfect team to be spoiled in the final. Four other college division one teams entered the tourney perfect, including a loaded, scary, Kentucky team not too many years ago, and a crazy good UNLV team in 1991, but they lost in the Final Four semis.

   Scott Drew, the architect of of this awesome Baylor squad, grew up in northern Indiana, then graduated from Butler University in Indianapolis.

   I guess the ghost of the Hoosiers is haunting Gonzaga and all these undefeated teams since.

   The spirit of '76.

  It remains in Indiana, in Monroe County, at Assembly Hall. Not where they played last night, at Lucas Oil Stadium at Indy. Or rather, the phantasm may have done its haunting there. And kept things secure 50 miles to the south.