Game Preview: Gonzaga vs Baylor

Gonzaga gets one helluva challenge in their first game of the season

A happy opening day to you and yours, as Gonzaga and Baylor end the pageantry of a day of college basketball with a late-night special following Monday Night Football. It’s a matchup of the AP preseason’s #8 Baylor Bears coming to the Spokane Arena to face the #6 Gonzaga Bulldogs.

A reminder from the podcast that the show will be doing a live stream during halftime and postgame tonight as we break down the result of the election game.

Gonzaga is 4-2 all-time versus Baylor, but 1-2 against the Bears with Scott Drew as the head coach. Drew won the last two matchups: a drubbing in the national title game in 2021 and a one-point victory in 2022. The intrigue of this game is in the known and the unknown of these two programs. Gonzaga’s returnees accounted for 81% of the team’s minutes played last season. Drew’s team is returning 30% of those played minutes.

But even with that amount of returning talent, there are still questions of what this Gonzaga team is going to look like and how much cohesion these lineups will have early on. Mark Few and his staff threw seemingly every conceivable group of rotational players he could over the two exhibition games that led up to today. We saw different starting lineups and different approaches to substitutions. On the other hand, we haven’t really seen anything from Baylor, who elected to hold secret scrimmages with Grand Canyon University and Texas A&M rather than a structured exhibition matchup.