The dominant basketball program in a conference is leaving. So why aren’t their opponents celebrating?

The men’s basketball team at Gonzaga was doomed — or so the coach of the small, Jesuit university would lament.

Dan Monson chuckles now at the memory. In the early 1990s he was a young Gonzaga assistant who would listen as his boss, Dan Fitzgerald, the Bulldogs’ coach who died in 2010, would lay out to Monson and Mark Few, another assistant, all the reasons why success in Spokane, Washington, seemed Sisyphean.

Convincing recruits to play at the school’s remote campus? Brutally difficult in a conference where Gonzaga’s rivals played in cities like San Diego, San Francisco, Portland and Los Angeles. The weather? Icy. Gonzaga’s tradition? Outside of alumnus John Stockton, almost non-existent.

“And he was right at the time,” Monson recalled recently. “He’d tell Mark and I all the time that Gonzaga is the worst job in the West Coast Conference.”

Such a notion seems absurd now.

Gonzaga guard Jalen Warley