In a title-winning turnabout, Florida does to Houston what Houston did to Duke
Florida, unlike a notable local team, is capable of inbounding the ball against Houston with the game on the line. That's not the only reason why the Gators were celebrating Monday night, but it is a big reason why they were and Duke wasn't.
The four No. 1 seeds in the Final Four delivered three games worthy of their stature, decided by a total of 11 points, the last a Florida comeback as remarkable as Houston's to beat Duke. Or, from the reverse angle, a late Houston collapse as remarkable as Duke's against the Cougars.
And after almost six months of basketball, more than 6,000 games, the national title was decided on a potential double-dribble, when Houston's Emanuel Sharp went up for a potential game-winner, lost the ball as Walter Clayton Jr. closed him out, then couldn't reclaim it without being whistled. The clock essentially ran out during the scramble for the ball, as Sharp watched helplessly.
Clayton, scoreless in the first half, had 11 points in the second, but that defensive play was bigger than any of them in a 65-63 win.
'We work on it in practice, closing out, jumping to the side so you don't foul the shooter,' Clayton said. 'He pump faked, threw the ball down, (Alex) Condon got on it, ended up being a good play. We won the game. The feeling, just surreal. It's a surreal feeling. I can't even explain it. But it feels good, though.'
It was a strange way to end the season, but it was eerily familiar of how Houston ended Duke's season Saturday. Houston led Florida by 12 in the second half — as Carl Lewis and Hakeem Olajuwon exulted in the stands — and two with two minutes to go, only to turn the ball over four times without making a shot the rest of the way. What the Cougars did to the Blue Devils in the final moments, the Gators did to the Cougars.
'We held that team to 65 points,' Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said. '(Walter) Clayton and (Alijah) Martin combined to go 5 for 20. If you would have told me we would hold those two guys 5 for 20? We had a good plan. We just didn't score it well enough to win. Scored it well enough to be in a position to win. At the end you've got to get a shot. Got to do better than that.'
That's how Todd Golden became the youngest coach, at 39, to win a national championship since Jim Valvano beat Houston in 1983 thanks to a slightly more dramatic finish, the first of now three title-game losses and seven Final Fours without a title. As the Cougars' wait for a championship goes on, Florida's title means that 17 of the past 21 national titles have been won by six schools: Connecticut, Duke, Florida, Kansas, North Carolina and Villanova.
These Gators are different than Billy Donovan's Gators that won back-to-back titles in 2006 and 2007, with Golden an offshoot of the analytics-focused Kyle Smith tree, a bunch of number-crunching whiz kids instead of grizzled basketball veterans like Sampson — whose team was no less innovative in its own way, beating teams with shot volume by crashing the offensive glass and taking care of the basketball.
The next branch of that tree is headed to Harnett County, imminently. Florida assistant John Andrzejek has been double-dipping throughout the NCAA tournament as Campbell's next head coach, using the team rental car to visit Buies Creek when Florida started the tournament in Raleigh, recruiting for the Camels while going the distance with the Gators.
Now he has to go back to Gainesville with the team on Tuesday before a group of Campbell boosters is coming to pick him up on a private jet to bring him to campus for his no-longer-indefinitely delayed introductory press conference. (As Mark Gottfried might say, there's a plane waiting to take you to Buies Creek.)
But these are good problems to have for a first-time head coach, who will never have a stronger case to make to potential recruits and transfers.
'It's unbelievable. It's the best, that explosion of emotion,' Andrzejek said on the floor, amid piles of blue and orange confetti. 'You're in it, you're competing, you're thinking about the situation, what do you do next, how do you guard the next thing? It's so sudden. It just goes to zero. And I'm just running, running on the court, looking for somebody to hug.'
He can keep the orange confetti and leave the blue. One season is over. For everybody, it's on to the next.
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