For a long time, the Naismith Hall of Fame has been known to observers as having a fuzzy set of guidelines for its nominees, nothing that you could stab with a fork and say, “This is the bar.”

I served briefly on the selection committee years ago, and – then and now – I’m not exactly sure what the qualifications are.

Mark Few, the Gonzaga basketball coach, was a bit of a different case for the selectors. He didn’t have the national-championship portfolio of a Mike Krzyzewski or Roy Williams, so the committee had to drill deeper.

In doing so, in voting him into its 2026 class per reports, it surely liked Few’s record of high-level success. But I would hope it recognized something broader in Few’s resume.

He’s unique. He’s one of one. If he didn’t build Gonzaga from scratch, he at least nurtured and fostered it and loved it up until it got to the point where, as CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander weighed in Tuesday, it’s one of the 15 biggest brands in college basketball.

It’s probably even a more select group, one in which Few can pick up a phone and have a realistic conversation with any coach in the nation about a home-and-home series.

I’m convinced Gonzaga’s rise is one of the great stories of American sports, an emergence from virtually nothing to an annual force in college basketball, owing chiefly to Few’s insistence on staying in Spokane through offers to head up some of the game’s most purebred programs.

Setting aside the fact Gonzaga got to its first NCAA tournament in 1995, and, brushing up toward the 21st century, had never won a game in March Madness, I doubt the Naismith selectors are even aware of the grimness facing Gonzaga back then.

The school faced a severe budget crisis based on flagging enrollment. It endured a power struggle for leadership that bounced out a president after one year. And it was dealing with the aftermath of NCAA probation over the misuse of funds by beloved basketball coach Dan Fitzgerald, a volatile issue among Zag supporters.

In 1999, the Zags pieced together an out-of-the-blue run to the Elite Eight under Dan Monson. He jumped to an opening at Minnesota, and Gonzaga’s unassuming new president, Robert Spitzer, fretted over the vacancy.

“Father, it’s done,” said Mike Roth, the athletic director. “We’re hiring Mark.”

“Oh, great,” Spitzer responded enthusiastically. “Which one is he?”

Few’s first two teams made Sweet 16s. Then they built a game-changing new arena. They added the bewitching Adam Morrison. Brick by brick, it got better and better, as Few turned his back on job after job – UCLA, Stanford, Indiana, Oregon, Florida, and who knows how many others.

Sure, there were setbacks. Days after earning their first No. 1 ranking and No. 1 seed in 2013, the Zags got chased out of the NCAA tournament in the Round of 32 by Wichita State. Interspersed among two appearances in the finals – 2017 and 2021 – were 2019 and 2022, when Gonzaga’s No. 1 seeds fell short of the Final Four. But the arc has always been steady.

On the radio Tuesday, a sports-talk host in Seattle mentioned that he’d gotten some “pushback” from listeners on Few’s worthiness to the Hall of Fame. Let me break it to those folks: You’re clueless.

Few has long-since set the NCAA record (27) for consecutive years qualified for the tournament at the start of a career. His 2015-24 teams went to nine straight Sweet 16s. Gonzaga’s string of first-round victories is at 17, and two more means the all-time record.

Gonzaga haters usually fall back on the softness of the West Coast Conference, as if that explains everything. Indeed, nobody in the Big Ten beats a conference opponent 51 times in a row as Gonzaga did to Pepperdine.

But that demands a look at what Few’s teams have done outside the WCC. In the last decade, regular-season and NCAA tournament, Gonzaga is 63-27 against power-conference programs.

He’s 2-1 against Alabama and 3-2 against Kentucky. He’s 2-0 over Kansas, the margins by 12 and 21 points. He beat Duke to win the 2018 Maui Invitational.

Over the sweep of his career, he has owned in-state rival Washington, 13-2. He went 5-0 against West Virginia’s Bob Huggins, a 2022 Hall inductee. He went 6-0 against Oklahoma State, causing the late, billionaire benefactor, T. Boone Pickens, to promise he’d build him a trout stream if he’d come to Stillwater.

Few stayed, as always. He won, but a lot of coaches can say they won. But, maybe more than the Naismith voters realize, nobody in college-basketball history has ever built quite like Mark Few.