Three thoughts on San Diego State’s 80-67 loss against No. 3 Gonzaga on Monday night at Viejas Arena:

1. Perspective

Here was Gonzaga’s starting lineup: senior, senior, senior, fifth-year senior, sixth-year senior. College games played: 432.

And seven minutes into the game, here’s what SDSU had on the floor: freshman, freshman, redshirt freshman, a sophomore who barely played last season and one senior.

It made for an unusual, uncomfortable juxtaposition of emotions afterward, the embarrassment from a rare double-digit loss at Viejas Arena buoyed by the positives from playing the nation’s No. 3 team within a point (52-51) over the final 26 minutes with a bunch of guys in their third college game.

Perception buoyed by perspective, pressure buoyed by patience.

The Aztecs have suffered a more lopsided home loss only once over the past 18 seasons and 274 games at Viejas Arena … and yet their preseason all-conference guard is out for another month, and their leading scorer from the opener went scoreless, and their most effective post defender got cramps, and their best rim protector fouled out with 8:45 to go.

“We have a challenging schedule,” said coach Brian Dutcher, whose team jumps right back into the fire against No. 14 Creighton next week in the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas. “I said this two months ago: We have to try to be good in November. I think what you saw out there were a lot of really good pieces … but we weren’t at our absolute best in early November.

“We did some things well, though: stop the fast break, did a few things well offensively, competed at a high level. It wasn’t like everything was broken. But we didn’t play well enough to beat a really good team.”

It could be a theme for the rest of the month, with the Aztecs unlikely to be favored in any of the three games in Las Vegas next week. (Monday was the first time in 22 years, since a 2002 matchup against No. 1 Arizona, that they’ve been a double-digit underdog at home.)

At one moment in the postgame interviews, Nick Boyd said: “We’re not really here for moral victories or to play a game close, we’re here to win.”

In the next, sitting next to him, sophomore BJ Davis marveled at Gonzaga senior guard Ryan Nembhard.

“It’s good for me to be matched up against somebody like that,” said Davis, who made only his third career start. “I can go back and watch it over and over and over, and see the things I could do or I should have done and apply them to the next game.

“It’s just things like that, seeing how they’re composed. It really gives me a chance to see, OK, this is what it feels like to really play and have games under your belt and be experienced like that.”

Are you enraged at losing? Or encouraged by progress?

Or maybe you can be both.

2. Next man up

Demarshay Johnson Jr. is in his fourth season at SDSU. He redshirted his first year and has played sparingly since, with 27 career appearances, most of them with the walk-ons in the closing minutes of blowout victories. He has scored 18 points; only four have come against Division I opposition.

This season, the 6-foot-10 forward is the 11th man in a nine- or 10-man rotation. Four bigs typically play; he’s No. 5.

But there he was Monday night, subbing in with 15:05 left in a single-digit game and staying in for a full four-minute shift, blocking a shot on his first defensive possession, running the floor, banging with Graham Ike in the post.

Dutcher, like all coaches, instills a next-man-up ethos. Magoon Gwath had four fouls. Pharaoh Compton had leg cramps. Jared Coleman-Jones needed a break. Miles Heide was already on the floor. Johnson was the next man up.

“I like Demarshay,” Dutcher said. “We’re deep at the post position. A lot of teams, you get in foul trouble and then you fall off production-wise a lot. But we’ve got five guys capable of playing that position. We’ve got fouls to give, which we gave.”

His value, though, goes beyond emergency minutes in the second half of a marquee game.

Most guys in his situation would have been long gone in college basketball’s transfer era. Johnson shook his head. He wanted to stay.

“Demarshay comes in every single day with a great attitude, probably one of the best teammates on the team,” point guard and de facto leader Boyd said. “He had a DNP the first game of the season. He still came in the gym and brought positive energy. When you have a guy like that on your team, it trickles down and the sky’s the limit when your team is unselfish, brings positive energy and has good character.”

3. Un-retired

Jason Phillips officiated 1,158 regular-season games over 19 NBA seasons and 95 more in the playoffs, including nine in the NBA Finals. He retired from on-court officiating in 2019, accepting a promotion to run the league’s Replay Center in New Jersey.

So what was he doing at Viejas Arena on Monday night?

Long story.

Phillips was merrily humming along in the NBA until the pandemic hit and the league, in consultation with its referee union, instituted a vaccine mandate. Phillips, a lifelong Baptist, applied for a religious exemption and had it denied. He was ultimately fired and had his pension frozen.

So he sued, along with two other longtime officials who had their religious exemptions denied as well.

“The NBA nixed the inoculation mandate for the 2022-2023 season,” the complaint says. “Nonetheless, it refuses to reconsider (their) terminations.”

The suit focuses less on the validity of the vax mandate than the “high standards” for religious exemptions. It claims no one received one, while noting that “during the 2021-2022 season, 65 out of the NBA’s 73 fully vaccinated referees (89%) tested positive for Covid.”

The case was filed in federal court in November 2022 and still hasn’t gone to trial. One of the officials, Ken Mauer, won a $2.9 million judgment earlier this year in a separate lawsuit against the NBA over the frozen pension.

In the meantime, the 54-year-old Phillips has un-retired. Unlike the NBA, which has a union, college basketball referees are independent contractors who can work for multiple conferences. Monday was his seventh game back.

“For the first time in my life, I had to justify what my beliefs are,” Phillips told “The Megyn Kelly Show” last year. “I will say this. The Bible says God’s plans are not our plans and His ways are not our ways. God takes us down paths that we don’t know we’re going down sometimes.”

Originally Published: November 19, 2024 at 4:45 PM PST