following year. Teams with greater success saw larger rises; tournament winners typically saw applications increase by 7 to 8%. As most schools did not raise enrollment after participating in the tournament, the greater number of applications caused them to be more selective in their admissions. Gonzaga One alleged "Flutie Effect", this one related to men's basketball, occurred at Gonzaga University at the turn of the 21st century. In the mid-1990s, freshman enrollment hovered around 500 students annually, including a total of 569 as late as 1998. Longtime school benefactor Jack McCann, who had joined the school's board of trustees that year, would say in a 2017 interview that "the school was in real trouble." Gonzaga's undergraduate enrollment had dropped from over 4,000 in 1990 to just under 2,800 in 1998. The school had operated at a deficit for several years, saw declines in its credit rating and a shrinking endowment, and had steadily reduced its staffing. A few faculty members suggested that Gonzaga athletics drop from Division I to a lower level. During the 1998–99 school year, Gonzaga made an unexpected run to the Elite Eight of the 1999 NCAA tournament, and freshman enrollment jumped to 701 that August. The Bulldogs won two games in each of the next two NCAA Tournaments, as freshman enrollment increased to 796 in 2000 and to a then-record 979 in 2001. In 2004, Rev. Robert Spitzer, then Gonzaga University president, said that the team's success was responsible for the school receiving the $23 million required to build the Bulldogs' current basketball home of McCarthey Athletic Center, most of which was received through major gifts. Unlike most schools that have experienced this phenomenon, Gonzaga has been seen as continuing to reap benefits from its basketball program, even two decades removed from the team's first major exposure to a national audience. In March 2017, as the Bulldogs were preparing to play in the program's first Final Four, ESPN writer Dana O'Neil said, "What has happened at Gonzaga is a lot more than the Flutie Effect." In 2003, with freshman enrollment booming, Gonzaga changed from a rolling admissions process to a more selective process with firm deadlines. This led to a noticeable increase in incoming student credentials, with median high school GPAs rising from 3.54 in 1998 to 3.71 in 2016 and median SAT scores rising from 1159 to 1290 in the same period. The McCarthey Athletic