As of Monday evening, three Bay Area teams have been assured NCAA Tournament berths – the Stanford women, the Cal men (the Bears are in, period, end of discussion) and now the St. Mary’s men, who prevented having to go through six days of anxiety by coming up with their biggest win since at least 1959, when the Gaels beat Idaho State for their one and only NCAA Tournament victory.  

When Rnady Bennett became St. Mary's coach in 2001, the Gaels were coming off a 2-27 season -- Photo by Liz Mangelsdorf/San Francisco Chronicle

You could  make the case this was St. Mary’s biggest win ever, since the Gaels beat the nation’s No. 18-ranked team to get into the NCAA Tournament in 2010, while the NCAA Tournament in 1959 was an oddly constructed 23-team affair with limited national exposure.  (Incidentally, Cal beat the Gaels that year on their way to the 1959 NCAA title.)

(Capules on all 65 NCAA Tournament teams will be posted on this site shortly after the selections are announced Sunday.)

Certainly, the way Monday’s game went down may have pushed it to the top of the St. Mary’s list.

It was not a shock that Mark Few removed all his starters with 1:51 left in Monday’s WCC title game, realizing the outcome was no longer in doubt.  The surprise was that it was St. Mary’s, not Gonzaga, that had assured the victory with nearly two minutes still remaining.

Not only did the Gaels beat Gonzaga to guarantee itself a spot in the NCAA Tournament, but it beat the Bulldogs by 19 points, 81-62.  It was Gonzaga’s largest margin of defeat against a conference foe since it lost to Santa Clara by 21 points back in 1992, the year before Steve Nash arrived at Santa Clara.   Gonzaga was just another mediocre team back then, and Ernie Kent was in his first season as St. Mary’s head coach that year.  Kent took the Gaels to the WCC tournament title in 1997, the only time St. Mary’s had won a conference tournament championship until Monday night.   (And now Kent is about to get fired at Oregon, which adds an odd bit of symmetry to the occasion.)

The strangest aspect of the Gaels’ lopsided win was that Omar Samhan had a season-low nine points, ending a string of 41 consecutive games in which Samhan had scored in double figures.  Yet the Gaels dominated

At the center of the thing was self-effacing Randy Bennett, who took over at St. Mary’s the year after the team had gone 2-27. And one of those wins was against a non-Division I team.  St. Mary’s may have been the worst Division I men’s basketball program in the country at the time, and Bennett lost his first three games in his rookie season of 2001-2002 season before ending St. Mary’s 23-game losing streak, the longest in the country at the time.

Eight seasons later, his team beat nationally ranked Gonzaga by 19 points in the finals of the WCC tourney.