The Winners and Losers of the Men’s NCAA Championship Game
Florida bent but never broke in its 65-63 win over Houston. And unfortunately for the Cougars, their final possession will live in infamy.
Who shined brightest in Florida’s 65-63 win over Houston in the men’s NCAA tournament championship game? Who fell short? Let’s dive into Winners and Losers.
Winner: Getting Back Up
This Florida team could take a punch. It got beat up early in physical tournament games against Connecticut, Texas Tech, Auburn, and then again on Monday night against Houston. And those games followed a similar script: Florida’s offense buffered through the first half, with one player keeping the Gators within striking distance, then they eventually settled in and were able to deliver a knockout blow—usually a gut-punch 3 from Walter Clayton Jr. It was like binge-watching the final scenes in the Rocky movies, only in basketball form. Rocky never cruises to a win. That wouldn’t be entertaining. And Florida won the national championship despite getting knocked down plenty of times, and collecting its fair share of bruises.
The Gators led for just 64 seconds of game time on Monday. They faced their largest deficit of the tournament (12 points) with 15:29 remaining. Adding an extra layer of difficulty was the fact that Florida put Houston in the bonus after committing seven fouls in six minutes to start the second half. Nothing was going their way, and Clayton couldn’t get anything going on the offensive end. His first points of the game came from the free throw line five minutes into the second half. To get the ball out of his hands, Houston consistently blitzed Clayton anytime he received a screen. And it worked. Clayton dished out five assists in the first half but was held scoreless in those first 20 minutes.
Florida coach Todd Golden eventually took Clayton off the ball and started using him as a cutter off screens. That got him going downhill and attacking the rim more often. And with Houston’s two rim protectors, Joseph Tuggler and Ja’Vier Francis, both in foul trouble, the paint was wide open for the Gators. Open shots were harder to come by on the perimeter. Golden got Clayton a great look for the 3 that tied the game and completed Florida’s rally with just over three minutes to go, but it was really his only clean jump shot of the night.
Clayton has been taking and making difficult shots all tournament, so this wasn’t a new experience for him. Florida’s half-court offense didn’t provide him with a lot of open 3s throughout their postseason run. Some of the bricks he threw up against the Cougars looked just like the hero shots he made over the first five rounds of the tournament. He just missed them on Monday night. Clayton had a few other slow starts, but for the most part, he didn’t let those affect his overall performance. He forced shots occasionally, but he was never overly aggressive and usually passed to an open teammate when appropriate. And Clayton always seemed to figure it out by the last few minutes of the game, just in time to help push the Gators over the edge. Once he got going on Monday, a Florida win felt inevitable.
Loser: Houston’s Late-Game Execution
All right, we have to talk about the last play of the game. Houston called a timeout down two points with 19 seconds left. Coach Kelvin Sampson had plenty of success drawing up inbound plays throughout the tournament—including the game-winning play against Purdue in the Sweet 16—but we didn’t get his best work in the final seconds of the title game. Sure, Florida deserves credit for its defensive effort: The Gators’ decision to aggressively go after Houston’s screens for Milos Uzan and L.J. Cryer—which forced the ball to the Cougars’ third option, Emanuel Sharp—proved to be the right one. And Clayton made one last clutch play, contesting Sharp’s potential shot attempt well enough that he ultimately opted out of it in midair. But the play took entirely too long, considering the situation. It took 14 seconds for the Cougars to even get the ball to Sharp, and they never once threatened the paint. The result was one of the least satisfying final plays in March Madness history.
Houston’s previous possession was also infuriatingly slow and yielded the same result: a Sharp turnover after a series of harmless passes 35 feet away from the basket. It was as if the Cougars had misread the scoreboard and were looking to milk the clock.
Those two possessions came at the end of an ugly offensive performance by the Cougars. This was the best offense Sampson has had during his tenure in Houston, but it may have saved its worst effort for last. The team’s 91.5 offensive efficiency against Florida was its worst mark since a December game on the road at Oklahoma State, per KenPom. What had been an offensive machine all season broke down at the most crucial moment.
Winner: Sasquatch State
It wasn’t just the Cougars’ offensive execution that was lacking. They couldn’t hit any damn shots, either. This was their worst shooting night of the season by effective field goal percentage. Houston bricked 19 shots from deep. Uzan missed all four of his attempts, Sharp went 1-for-7, and Cryer was 4-of-11 from deep. And some of those misses weren’t close. This team finished third in the nation in 3-point percentage this season, per KenPom. It hadn’t shot worse than 35.7 percent from 3 all tournament. The ghosts of all those bricklaying Houston teams of the past returned at the worst possible moment.
The bricks were flying from the start. In a first-half sideline interview, Sampson blamed the poor shooting (of both teams) on the nerves of playing on the sport’s biggest stage, and not in “the middle of January against Sasquatch State.”
I would imagine that shooting over the length of Sasquatch State would cause some issues for any basketball team. And shooting over Florida’s length definitely bothered Houston. The Cougars didn’t make a “guarded” catch-and-shoot jump shot all night, per Synergy. They had made at least two in each of the first five rounds of the tournament.
There wasn’t just one explanation for the cold shooting night. Florida put unrelenting pressure on Houston’s shooters; there were certainly some national-title nerves affecting those shots; and the Cougars offense didn’t function like it has all season. Houston did a lot of things right on Monday night. It just couldn’t put the ball in the basket. It’s hard to beat any team when you play like that—even in mid-January against a made-up school straight out of Sampson’s imagination.
Winner: Will Richard
Even with Houston shooting poorly in the first half, Florida was lucky to trail by just three at intermission. The Gators turned the ball over nine times and forced just two Houston turnovers in the first 20 minutes. They didn’t score a single fast-break point, shot just two free throws, and grabbed only four offensive rebounds. Throughout the season, Florida’s offense was powered by its transition attack, second-chance points, and free throws. Houston shut down all of those scoring pipelines early in the game. It’s a minor miracle the Gators got to the locker room with 28 points.
Will Richard was the player who kept Florida in the hunt, accounting for half of the Gators’ first-half scoring. Richard went 5-of-8 from the field, including 4-of-6 beyond the arc, while his teammates combined on 6-of-21 shooting. Richard made some tough shots, too. They weren’t generated in the flow of the offense or set up by a teammate’s drive and kick. He hit three 3s from the triple-threat position with a Houston defender’s hand directly in his face.
Richard was an unlikely candidate to catch fire for Florida after going two straight rounds without hitting a 3. He had scored just 13 points combined in the wins over Texas Tech and Auburn. But he lit up Houston for 14 in the first 20 minutes alone. Richard cooled off in the second half and only tacked on four more points, but he had already done enough, occupying the team’s hero role long enough for Clayton to get himself together and reclaim it.
Tourney Madness
Loser: The Fight Against SEC Domination
Florida’s triumph was the culmination of a decade-long Greg Sankey project to turn the SEC into the basketball conference. It was the best league in the country all season by the numbers, had 14 of its 16 teams in the NCAA tournament, set a record for wins by a conference in a single tournament, and ultimately produced the national champion. The argument for this year’s SEC being the best conference in college basketball history is strong, even if you can push back against it. But that’s beside the point. There is no question of whether it’s the best league in the country right now.
That should continue for myriad reasons. The most significant factor is money. College sports have always been ruled by the richest programs, but the financial edge is even more important in the days of the transfer portal and NIL. The stakes of recruiting the wrong blue-chip prospects aren’t what they used to be—now that you can go out and recruit an experienced player who was developed by another coach. Florida is proof of that. Clayton was a transfer who played under Rick Pitino at Iona. Alijah Martin played in a Final Four under Dusty May at Florida Atlantic. Richard started at Belmont, and center Rueben Chinyelu came over from Washington State last offseason. Golden’s three-year rebuild at Florida is a fantastic advertisement to coaches about the power of the SEC. You’ll have the money to quickly assemble a championship roster. As long as you pick the right players, you’ll have a chance to contend in a hurry. "The difference between the SEC this year and why there was such a great separation, top to bottom, there was commitment in the NIL and investing in our student-athletes," Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said at the start of the tournament. You could never win without talent. Now, you can’t get talent without money.
Coaches know this, and that’s why the best ones are flocking to the jobs with the biggest NIL collectives. That is the SEC’s other superpower. "I haven't coached against any bad coaches [in the SEC]," Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said earlier in March. "I really haven't. I've coached against coaches that haven't had the same resources along the way, and sometimes you can win some of the time like that, but not overall at the level that you want to be able to sustain it."
