Gonzaga basketball's Mark Few joins exclusive club with 700 career wins

Gonzaga basketball cruised to an 86-61 win over Pepperdine on Thursday night, but it wasn’t just another conference victory for Mark Few's Bulldogs.

The win gave Few 700 as Gonzaga's head coach, making him the 14th active coach and 2nd fastest ever to reach the milestone at the Division I level. Kentucky legend Adolph Rupp recorded his 700th win in four fewer games than Few.

“I’m not a numbers guy,” Few said, per the Spokesman-Review. “This one feels as good as some of the other ones we did, just based on where we were at, what we were facing, the way we had to dig it out and compete. As uncomfortable as it was, I don’t think you’d want it any other way.”

Coming off a rare conference loss, Gonzaga used a dominant second half to pull away from Pepperdine after the score was tied at halftime. It's fitting that a milestone win for Few comes against Pepperdine, a school that has failed to beat Gonzaga on 47 straight occasions, including twice this season.

Bulldogs have to turn it up

It's been an unfamiliar season for Gonzaga, its 25th with Few in charge. The Bulldogs are 12-5 after Thursday's win, a respectable record but not when you consider the expectations and history of Few's Gonzaga teams.

This is the worst start to a season for the Bulldogs since 2010-11 when they finished the season 25-10, the last and only second time Gonzaga dropped double-digit games in a single season under Few.

Remarkably, the Bulldogs went seven consecutive seasons losing fewer than five regular season games from the 2016-17 season to last year. They lost at least five games total in a season twice during that span. After losing a total of 14 games from the start of the 2016-17 season to its defeat in the 2021 national championship game, Gonzaga now has 15 losses over the last three seasons.

Gonzaga's streak of 143 consecutive weeks ranked in the AP Top 25 poll ended this week as the Bulldogs dropped from the rankings for the first time since 2016. 39 of those weeks were spent as the No. 1 team in the country.

Though Thursday night's win was a nice pickup for the Bulldogs, there is more work to be done if they want to contend for a national title. That's the only thing missing from Mark Few's coaching resume, but the players and coaches he earned his 700 wins with might mean more to him than a trophy.

“What a great run and just unbelievable players,” Few said. “Just unbelievable players everybody fell in love with and then just a great staff, man. Just an awesome run of staff and that’s what made this thing so special.”