Season Recap: There’s Never Been a Gonzaga Bulldog Quite Like Jalen Warley

Mark Few has coached at Gonzaga for 27 years. In that time he’s had All-Americans, NBA lottery picks, and players who went on to become the best in the world at what they do. He’s never had anyone quite like Jalen Warley. That’s not hyperbole. That’s what Few said himself, out loud, at a postgame press conference in January, after watching Warley guard a seven-footer and a point guard in the same possession and then score 19 points on 7-of-10 shooting against the San Francisco Dons.

There has simply never been another Zag like Warley, and although the Zags only got one actual season of play out of him, he kept finding ways to make himself indispensable at every step along the way.

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Wait, Who Is This Guy?

When Gonzaga announced it had added Warley in November 2024, the reaction in Zag circles was somewhere between cautious optimism and genuine confusion. A midseason addition from the transfer portal from the Florida State Seminoles, a 6-7 point guard from the Atlantic Coast Conference, one year of eligibility left, ineligible to play until 2025-26. It was a big get, a huge deal to have a player of his caliber on the roster, but it was unclear from the jump as to what exactly he was being brought to Spokane, Washington, to do for the Zags.

His recruitment profile out of high school was enticing, though. Warley came out of Westtown School in West Chester, Pennsylvania, as a top-35 national recruit, the third-ranked combo guard in the country, a McDonald’s All-American nominee averaging 15.6 points, 5.5 rebounds, and 7.0 assists as a senior on a team that included Dereck Lively II. Had he committed to Gonzaga as a freshman, he would have been one of the top-5 highest ranked recruits in program history.

He started 58 of 96 games at Florida State and improved in nearly every statistical category every single year. But it never seemed like the Seminoles ever cracked the code of what exactly to do with a player like Warley. By his junior season, he was averaging…

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Publish date : 2026-05-01 15:04:00

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