Gonzaga’s Mark Few is one sensitive dude

February 3, 2010 by John Stansberry

Why does Mark Few get insulted when people refer to Gonzaga as a mid-major basketball program? Check out this exchange from the CBS College Sports network show “Courtside with Seth Davis” from earlier this evening:

Seth Davis: Does it bother you when guys like me still refer to Gonzaga as a mid-major?

Mark Few: You know, I kind of compartmentalize things, that just goes into my ‘he doesn’t really know what he’s talking about,’ even though you do on a variety of subjects I just kind of slide it over to that side. People sometimes like to put things into a box I guess, and I don’t think you can put Gonzaga into a box, I don’t think it really fits. You know our league is very much a mid-major league and certainly our success over the last ten or twelve years compares to anyone outside of maybe a Duke or Carolina, along those levels.

Few was all over the place in that response but let me break down what he’s saying: Seth, you’re an idiot, we’re nearly on the level of Duke and North Carolina and we’re light years ahead of anyone in our crappy league.

The way he recoils at the label you would think that mid-major implies that those type of teams consist only of lepers. C’mon Mark, it’s not as bad as you’re making it out to be.

A mid-major is simply a program that exists outside of the traditional power conferences. Often, a mid-major is a smaller school that not every Tom, Dick or Beyonce has heard of. That’s not a function of disdain on the part of run of the mill sports fans, but the result of mid-majors not getting much exposure from the national media.

It’s fascinating to me that Few refuses to admit that he coaches a mid-major, but says that the WCC is “very much a mid-major league.” Does this mean he feels that Gonzaga is basically slumming it in their current conference?

Hey, there’s an easy solution to that, the school can just stroll into the Pac-10 with BYU and make it a 12-team league. Oh, wait, Gonzaga dropped football in 1941, and you kinda need that sport to get into one of those primo non-mid-major leagues.

Few also seems to believe that continuous on-the-court success means a program can shed its mid-major label. That’s all well and good, but $40 million in the bank didn’t make Jed Clampett any less of a hillbilly.

Let Gonzaga finish the regular season with a 17-11 record and an early exit from the West Coast Conference and we’ll find out just how much of a mid-major they really are.

My advice to Coach Few…lose the Napoleonic complex and just go with the flow. There are far worse things you can call a program than “mid-major.”