Gators were ready for the muck

Florida's two-point championship win over Houston reflected today's loud, ungainly game.

Todd Golden

When the 2025 season ended late Monday night, the basketball was on the floor, in the custody of someone who is 6-foot-11. That could be the logo of this NCAA tournament, and certainly this championship game. It wasn’t a concerto. It was grunge. It may have set unofficial records for bruises-per-point.

Florida’s Alex Condon corralled the ball that Houston’s Emanuel Sharp was forced to release, because Walter Clayton Jr. had run at Sharp, who was attempting a jump shot. He jumped, all right, but he came down before he could shoot, and he had to watch Condon, the man from Perth, sprawl to earth. The big Aussie hit the ground, careful not to travel, and awaited the whistle. When it sounded, Florida had won its third NCAA title, 67-65 over Houston, and thus became the first school to win three of these and also three national football championships. It’s getting harder to tell which sport is which.

Not that Florida can’t put up the points when needed. The Gators scored 84 on Texas Tech and beat Auburn 79-73 in the semifinals. But they also did not flinch at the sight of Houston’s legendary defense, rebounding and general irascibility. Four teams had beaten the Cougars and all of them had scored 70 or more points. Florida didn’t need to. It played this game on Houston’s turf and on Houston’s terms, and had to wipe out an 11-point deficit to a team that holds opponents to 30.2 percent shooting from deep. It succeeded, and the streets of Gainesville were jammed afterward, with the city fathers thankful they’d had the foresight to put grease on all the poles.

With 14:07 left, Sharp hit one of two foul shots and Houston led 45-34. It would score 18 points the rest of the way even though it was already in the bonus. Clayton, held scoreless in the first half, made his customary emergency shots, but he still ended up 3 for 10. The offense star was Will Richard, who kept Florida within sight as he scored 14 in the first half. But his grunt plays were just as important. With 2:18 left he grabbed an offensive board, made two free throws and kept the game tied. With 0:26 to go he reached in to disrupt Sharp’s dribble, knocking the ball off the Houston guard’s knee and out of bounds. The Cougars didn’t have a field goal in the final 2:18.

Richard is a symbol of college basketball in mid-decade. He didn’t get many recruiting looks, out of his Atlanta suburb, because of Covid-19, so he went to Belmont, the strong mid-major program in Nashville. When he made second-team All-Ohio Valley, the suitors gathered, and Richard picked Florida. Another OVC star, Johni Broome of Morehead State, became a first-team All-American at Auburn.

Richard profited from the attention that Clayton got, but he and Alijah Martin, who played in the 2022 Final Four with Florida Atlantic, are exactly the rugged swingmen that college coaches want. They shoot and defend and they’re strong, which helps in the Darwinian world of college basketball officiating, at least until Monday night’s second half, when the refs seemed to think they were getting paid by the toot.

Two rules changes have made the college game resemble a demolition derby at times. The 3-point shot has extended the offense, and now coaches have figured out how to extend the defense. Wingspan is the key, and it shrinks the room that offenses need. Houston’s final, futile possession was conducted solely behind the bonus line. The other is the reduction of the shot clock to 30 seconds. It’s easier to play defense for 30 seconds than 35. Maybe it takes away one more option, and there are more and more heaves as the shot clock recedes.

Since KenPom.com began analyzing college basketball in 1997, only one national champion, Baylor in 2021, has not ranked among the Top 20 in defensive efficiency. Florida was sixth this year. In 2006 and 2007, when the Gators won back-to-back titles, they ranked 13th and seventh. Last year they were 94th. Golden identified post defense as his top priority and was hoping to coax the Gators into the Top 50 on defense. He, and they, overachieved.

Houston shot 6 for 25 from 3-point land and shot 34.8 percent overall. It also had just five assists on 24 buckets, which meant the Gators were staying home on shooters and keeping the ball from changing sides, for the most part. But Florida only shot 6 for 24 on long ones and shot 37.9. If there was a difference, it was the job Florida did on J’Wan Roberts, the Cougars’ inside bellwether. Roberts shot 3-for-13 and did not touch the ball during that last infamous possession, the one that ended without the Cougars getting a shot, a fact that coach Kelvin Sampson called “incomprehensible.”

There were 19 seconds left when Denzel Aberdeen’s free throw gave Florida its 2-point lead. Houston had a lot of options. It tried the right side of the floor, but Thomas Haugh, one of four functional Florida bigs, double-teamed Milos Uzan as he tried to turn the corner, and Uzan picked up his dribble. On the other side, Roberts was setting a deep pick for Sharp, who was coming outside from the lane, but Clayton got there before Sharp could shoot cleanly.

It wasn’t a thing of beauty, but it was also a 2-point game, and Roberts might have at least gotten fouled had he gotten the ball inside. And thus another Houston bid for an NCAA championship ends in galling fashion. The Cougars have been to seven Final Fours and have won none, which is a record.

Todd Golden, 39 going on 29 and 30 years younger than Sampson, now joins a narrowing list of active championship coaches: Self, Calipari, Pitino, Hurley, Izzo and Drew. Three years ago he was coaching San Francisco. Eleven years ago he was an assistant at Columbia. He was a walk-on at St. Mary’s, a 145-pounder when he was the point guard at Sunnyslope High in Phoenix. He married a St. Mary’s volleyball player, and their tennis matches don’t always end peaceably. He’s known for bristling competitiveness and a high opinion of what he can do, which seems quite justified at the moment.

And he’s another example of how Florida finds coaches who can last. In 1996 the Gators were looking for a young coach to kick-start their program, and athletic director Jeremy Foley was drawn to the 30-year-old Marshall coach, who had played and coached for Rick Pitino. Billy Donovan came to Gainesville and won back-to-back championships with Joakim Noah, Corey Brewer and Al Horford (yes, the guy who’s still with the Celtics). Donovan served 19 years at Florida before he joined the Oklahoma City Thunder. He’s now coaching the Chicago Bulls and, this week, was named to the Basketball Hall of Fame. So there’s precedent here.

Golden was known for something less pleasant. It wasn’t often mentioned in San Antonio, but his season began with a foreboding story in the Daily Alligator, Florida’s student newspaper. It mentioned that the school was investigating its coach for stalking female students and texting vulgar pictures of his own anatomy to them. Golden did not step aside during this process, and in late January the school announced that this Title IX investigation had closed, with no evidence of wrongdoing.

It was an uneasy year in all college sports, thanks to all the money, the transfers, and the disappearance of boundaries. An upcoming settlement of House v. NCAA will tell us where the money’s going. Fortunately it all comes down to the court, and this was the strongest group of championship contenders in years. The leading scorer in Division I was Villanova’s Eric Dixon. He averaged only 23.3 points. It took depth and cohesion, and scorers from all angles, to win. It took superior effort and design to score profusely. Everything was a struggle, and after a while there was glory to it. As we’ve seen in pro sports, money and effort are not mutually exclusive.

The Gators hungrily attacked the postgame net ceremony, which featured 7-foot-9 Olivier Rioux of Terrebonne, Quebec. Rioux was named the tallest teenager in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records. He’s redshirting at Florida, and when it came time for him to clip a strand, Rioux just walked over and reached up, no ladder necessary. It might take Florida a while to find rungs for Rioux to conquer. But, no matter how high he stretches, he’ll have to get familiar with the floor.