Florida returns to college basketball’s peak, rallying past Houston for first title since 2007

SAN ANTONIO – The shorts were shorter than the parachutes with drawstrings preferred by college basketball players a couple of decades ago. The rest of this rhapsody in blue at the Alamodome? That matched the moments Florida fans of certain ages surely recall. Players leaping and bouncing off each other, sprinting to the side of the floor to scream at elated supporters, falling into their coaches’ arms for long embraces as the confetti fell.

And a temporary dais set up on the middle of the floor, waiting for the Gators to climb up and look down at the rest of the college basketball universe. The same view the program had in both 2006 and 2007. After those back-to-back national championship breakthroughs, here came the long-awaited triple-crowning.

Florida is the national champion after a 65-63 win over Houston, and at a glance, it does look like everyone just finished a ride in a time machine. A 30-something former college point guard with one stopover as a midmajor coach takes over and eventually puts together a deep, balanced roster that’s remarkably efficient on both ends of the floor. A title follows.

Meet the new hoss. Same as the old hoss.

“It gave us relevance again, as a basketball school,” said Al Horford, the 18-year NBA veteran and two-time All-SEC forward for Florida’s back-to-back champs of ’06 and ’07. “And that history that was created at (Florida), we were making steps but we couldn’t quite get there – and I feel like coach (Todd) Golden and this group of guys have restored that prominence for us again.”

The national championship follows those back-to-back titles but – unlike those – was dragged out of oblivion. Down 12 points early in the second half, and hit with two technical fouls in two separate moments of lost composure, the team with the best offense in the country won with defense. Florida forced Houston into four turnovers in the last two minutes, with the title on a stop and a scramble for a loose ball as time ran out.

The two-point final margin? It matched the Gators’ largest lead of the night, in a game in which they scored the second-fewest points they had all year.

“We did what we did all year,” Florida coach Todd Golden said on the floor in the immediate aftermath. “We stayed the course.”

What happened is what has happened for the last three weekends.

The Gators started in the mud, missing their first six shots from 3-point range and committing six turnovers in the first 10 minutes. They also were completely in the game despite the struggles. Eventually someone made some shots – this time it was Richard, who connected on four 3s en route to 14 first-half points – and the halftime deficit was merely three. So it went against Texas Tech in the Elite Eight, Auburn in the national semifinals and now Houston in the title match: Florida had a whole half to fix things.

Some more unraveling, though, first: Five Florida personal fouls early in the second half created a startling moment of lost composure. A technical foul on the Gators bench, which erupted after a whistle at the 17:21 mark, precipitated a free throw and a 3-pointer from Houston’s L.J. Cryer on the ensuing possession. The deficit was 10 at that point and swelled to 12 soon after. Then the Gators’ explosiveness helped solve another problem.

An 8-0 burst made it a one-possession game by the 12-minute mark. A stretch in which Houston missed 11 of 12 shots permitted Florida to linger and then tie the game at 48 by the 7:54 mark, when Clayton took contact on a drive for a bucket – his first field goal of the game after an 0-for-6 start – and sank the ensuing free throw.

The final steps to becoming a three-time champion would be taken all the way at the end, all the way through the thicket of Houston’s top-rated defense and game officials who whistled the teams for a combined 25 second-half fouls.

Martin, playing in his second Final Four after an appearance with Florida Atlantic in 2023, hit a pair of free throws with 46.5 seconds left to give the Gators the lead at 64-63. After a timeout, Florida induced Houston’s Emanuel Sharp into a turnover with 26.5 seconds to go. Guard Denzel Aberdeen hit one free throw after the Gators nearly turned it over against Houston’s full-court pressure, giving Houston at least one last trip to tie or win it all.

Instead, Sharp lost the ball on a hard close-out, it bounced out near halfcourt and no player on either side could corral it before time ran out. A second Houston Final Four miracle undone, and Florida’s return to the mountaintop confirmed.

Florida will lose very important cogs like Clayton and guard Alijah Martin. It will lose two assistants – Golden’s de facto offensive and defensive coordinators – to head coaching jobs elsewhere. It still might be the preseason No. 1 team and should be among the top contenders for the 2026 national title. And the ambition of the man running the whole operation never has been terribly difficult to measure, which could mean the Billy Donovan comparisons run even deeper.

At some point, anyway.

“He’ll be an NBA head coach,” Stanford coach Kyle Smith, who coached Golden at Saint Mary’s and then hired him at Columbia and San Francisco, told The Athletic recently. “(That age group) can handle all the attention that maybe is stressful for the Gen X guy I am. They love the attention, they love the options, it’s really comfortable for them.”

This was, of course, not the concern at the Alamodome on the first Monday in April.

This night was entirely about now and then.

“A team that plays hard,” two-time national champion Horford said, describing what he saw in the 2024-25 club that gave his groups some company. “A team that finds a way.”