EVER SEE A TITLE GAME WHERE A PLAYER WALKS INSTEAD OF FIRING A FINAL SHOT?
Florida won because Walter Clayton Jr. made a memorable defensive play, without his offensive production, and because Kelvin Sampson’s gritty players didn’t manage a shot in the final two possessions
The people who want schools to make direct payments to players, while reimbursing them for $2.8 billion in NIL damages, might start asking why this week. A national championship game between Florida and Houston was worth something in gravel, stones and dust but didn’t produce many offensive sensations. In the end, Emanuel Sharp had the ball beyond the three-point arc and could have shot and won the title for Kelvin Sampson.
He didn’t. Racing from the paint, Walter Clayton Jr. hadn’t performed well offensively but saw a chance to win defensively for the Gators. He leaped high in front of Sharp, who stopped his motion and suddenly dropped the ball to the court. This was an oddball way to end the game, but the clock ran out Monday night and Florida won 65-63.
The last two seasons, Connecticut won with dominance as Dan Hurley screamed hell to the planet. This time? The winner is Todd Golden, who survived Title IX complaints from women accusing him of sexual harassment and sending lewd photos of himself on Instagram. We are not sure how Florida won and whether Golden will fire lawsuits after the university found no evidence “within a university program or activity.”
Life goes on when a major athletic program has control and holds the cards. Clayton is off to the NBA after he scored just 11 points against Sampson’s defenders, making only 1 of 7 from past the three-point line, and never was more disruptive in assailing Sharp. One hero was Will Richard with 18 points and 8 rebounds. The Gators shot 39 percent and 25 percent on threes and committed 13 turnovers. They led the game for 64 seconds.
Mind explaining how they won?
“Just go 100 percent,” Clayton said about his defensive standstill. “We were just trying to get a stop. We happened to get it. I’m happy.”
And the explosion? “It’s still surreal right now, I can’t even lie,” said Clayton, who was named the Final Four’s Most Outstanding Player. “We stayed together. We got a group of guys that love each other on and off the court. We got a great brotherhood, so we were able to stay together through adversity. Our motto is, we all can go. It ain't just about me. My team held me down until I put the ball in the basket. Shout out to them boys.”
This was the best chance for Sampson to win a trophy. For all his 20th-century grit and say it — meanness — a team of practice maniacs was left ragged with chances to roadkill a 12-point lead. Houston couldn’t make a shot when it mattered. Florida did at some point, relying on Clayton after he didn’t score a basket until five minutes into the second half. The rhythm was Sampson’s defense against the data and occasional firepower of Golden, who is 39 and the first victorious coach under 40 since Jim Valvano in 1983. It was hard to watch, yet wildness happened in the end, even when Houston didn’t manage a shot in the final two possessions. Wouldn’t that be a major coaching flaw?
“Incomprehensible in that situation we couldn’t get a shot, and obviously we didn’t need a three,” said Sampson, who remains title-free at age 69. “Clayton made a great play. But that’s why you’ve got to shot fake and get into the paint. Two’s fine. Give Florida credit, too. I'm not going to sit up here and poor mouth, pity mouth us. We held that team to 65 points. 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? At the end, you've got to get a shot. Got to do better than that.”
Did it cross your mind that Sampson is so demanding of his players defensively that they couldn’t finish the book? “We scored enough to be in position to win,” he said. “We guarded them. I felt like if we held Florida under 70, we’d have a chance to win,” he said. “Saturday (against Duke), we found a way to win. Tonight, not so much.”
Sharp? “We have a set where it's a stack or gate. We thought if we could get Emanuel to shot fake and get downhill,” Sampson said.
He kept the locker room closed for several minutes. At a press conference, he didn’t need long to call out a reporter who said Houston had only five assists, the fewest since 2020. “What's your first name?” Sampson said.
“Evan Miyakawa,” said the reporter.
“Let me explain how an assist works, Evan. I'm not sure …” Sampson said. “When you throw the ball to somebody, and they score, that's an assist, right? We threw the ball a lot to J'Wan (Roberts) in the post, and he missed some shots he normally makes. So those were possible potential assists that we had a lot. We just didn't make a lot of shots. I don’t know. … You're the stat guy, right?”
Said Houston’s Joseph Tugler: “We’ve been working for this the whole year, the moment we’ve been waiting for. I know it’s going to hurt, break everybody’s heart.”
Golden wore a backwards ballcap when he spoke. He is the first coach in the last 20 years, in a title game, to overcome a deficit of at least nine points. “We didn’t panic when it got tough. We stayed the course. We didn’t point any fingers,” he said. “We didn’t try to start making hero plays. We didn’t gamble defensively. We got rewarded because of the toughness we displayed.”
Said Martin: “We didn’t blink. We showed up at every moment in the game. It happens every time we need it to happen. We’re built for it. We’re built for the last moments.”
At some point, Golden will announce if he’ll ignore the case that never was. Or if he’ll sue people. “We’ve just kept our head down and focused, and we haven’t let some of the outside attention disrupt us and take us off our path,” he said. “I’ll continue to handle some of those situations after the season’s over.”
This week, we’re awaiting an industry-shaking decision by Judge Claudia Wilken in Oakland. Monday, she told lawyers to complete their cases soon. “I think it's a good settlement,” she said. “Don't quote me.”
We’re quoting her. A school, through a salary cap, can pay players around $20.5 million per year as power conferences control NIL deals. That can work both ways, with Duke reportedly ready to spend $10 million for next season’s basketball roster.
What people want to see, above all, are great games for the money. Florida won a title. It was not a great game.
“He walked. He can’t touch it,” we heard CBS describe the final seconds.
You win by taking a shot. You lose when the mic drops.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.