WCC announces conference basketball matchups

SAN MATEO, Calif. — The West Coast Conference released matchups for the upcoming 2022-2023 men’s basketball season on Tuesday. Conference matchups include 16 games between teams in the conference.

Each team will play each other at least once throughout the season. The conference updated its regular season to a 16-game season five years ago as part of the Conference Men’s Basketball Enhancement Plan.

The changes for the 2018-2019 season were in effort to promote the league to a multi-bid conference in the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, rather than only sending the winner of the conference tournament to March Madness.

The results have shown with the WCC sending at least two teams to the NCAA Tournament in the previous five seasons, not including the 2019-2020 season which was canceled due to Covid.

The Zags will have home-and-away matchups with BYU, Loyola Marymount, Pepperdine, Portland, Saint Mary’s, San Francisco and Santa Clara. In addition, they will also have a home game against San Diego and will travel to Pacific.

The conference matchups are put together through three trials of examination; through NET rankings of recent seasons, performance in the previous season’s WCC Tournament and through a spring survey of the conference’s 10 head coaches.

Minus a 67-57 road loss to Saint Mary’s, the Bulldogs breezed through the conference schedule last season. Over the previous four seasons after the increase to a 16-game schedule, Gonzaga has a record of 59-2 in conference play.

Dates and times of the games will not be announced until later in the summer.