SAN ANTONIO — He was coming alive.
You could feel it shift with every moment, every second that ticks off the clock. Lurking from one corner of the Alamodome to the other, Walter Clayton Jr. continued to eye his opponent, and in the final moments of Monday’s game, the senior guard sprung.
This isn’t a story of perfection, however, putting the ceremonial cap on a historic tournament for Clayton Jr. The All-American went scoreless through the first 20 minutes on Monday, while Houston’s nation-leading defense threw everything it had at shutting down the March Madness star. With a first-half 0-for-4 clip, it wasn’t Clayton Jr.’s night … until it was.
The Alamodome sported a boxing ring on Monday night, much by Houston’s invention, and with a national championship hanging in the balance, top-seeded Florida beat Houston 65-63. It was Clayton Jr.'s 11 second-half points, though, that provided the final blow, as Florida came back from down 12 in the second half in San Antonio. The win is Florida’s third national championship, but its first since 2007, marking a reascension to national dominance.
“What separates us and has separated us all season long is our team talent, how our guys have played together and for each other all year,” Golden said. “Because of that, we can call each other national champions for the rest of our lives.”
Fittingly, the basketball bloodbath ended on the floor, with Florida sophomore forward Alex Condon diving onto a loose ball as the buzzer sounded. Moments prior, Houston redshirt junior guard Emanuel Sharp launched into the air, but couldn’t get a shot off. He landed and desperately attempted to shield anyone wearing blue from the ball but with the clock running out, you could see it. He definitely did too. Houston had gotten out-bodied at its own game in the most significant moments, turning the ball over on both of its possessions in the final 40 seconds.
But that shouldn’t come as a surprise. At least not if you watched the previous 10 minutes of gameplay or Florida as a whole this season.
For the fourth consecutive time, the Gators got off to a sluggish start, sinking into the slow-paced, grueling ways of a Houston system that ranked 360th out of the 364 Division I teams in adjusted tempo. The box-shaped Alamodome batted around the sound of rim-banging misses, as the CBS audio guy clearly hadn’t prepared his mics for the atrocious shooting performance that was unfolding on Monday night. Florida and Houston combined to miss their first 13 attempts from beyond the arc, but that rate didn’t hold through the entirety of the night.
Senior guard Will Richard hit the first 3-pointer of the evening and weathered the storm of Clayton Jr.’s abysmal start, scoring 14 points in the first half to keep Florida within striking distance. From there, the Gators did what they had already done 35 times this season: they found a way.
While it wasn’t the 80-plus point offensive performances that guided Florida to the Final Four, or even the harrowing late-moment heroics that pushed it past Auburn, UF watched the game unfold and adjusted the same way it had throughout the season. In this case, Florida cut its turnover total from nine in the first half to only four in the second. This also meant wandering away from the 3-point line, where the Gators shot 4 for 14 to open the game, and leaning into the paint to shoot 19 second-half free throws. They hit 15 of those, compared to their two total attempts in the entire first half.
“Houston was guarding us great. They do a great defense out there. Everyone knows them for that,” Richard said. “[We] just [kept] trying to make plays to help us stay in the game, help us give our ourselves the best chance to win.”
That’s where Clayton Jr. stumbles into this script.
While some Houston fans mockingly searched the streets of San Antonio during halftime looking for him, he reappeared in the second half, scoring nine points in the game’s final eight minutes. He never had the signature, game-defining moment he had championed himself for throughout the NCAA Tournament. But when he hit his sole 3-point shot of the night to tie the game with three minutes left, rolling around a pick in a way Houston never let any other team do this season, you could easily tell he was the best player on the court. That was solidified amid the chaos of the postgame processions when he was named the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player.
This, as they say, isn’t surprising.
He had been astonishing throughout the tournament, averaging 22.3 points per game, which would’ve placed him second in the nation this season in scoring. With each shot he took during the postseason run, defeating UConn in the Round of 32, Texas Tech in the Elite Eight and Auburn in the Final Four, a paradigm developed. The Gators won because they had Clayton Jr. and the other team didn’t.
When Florida beat Auburn on Saturday, the star was unfazed, intonating “one more” to every set of ears in the Florida locker room. After his 11 points on Monday, clasping the national championship trophy in one arm and his daughter in the other, there was no purer expression of joy in San Antonio. On one hand, the culmination of past moments that defined his legacy at UF, and on the other laid his future. For a few moments, he finally was present in both.
This was a tale of two dramatically different fighters — a tale where the pair were never going to dance the same, never going to align and, surely, were never going to play nice. It was one that differed in style as well, where the two teams were direct representations of those who designed them.
The championship featured the largest age gap between head coaches ever (30 years), with Houston’s Kelvin Sampson, 69, facing Golden, 39. While one played methodically, the other championed aggression and adaptability, and that saved Florida as the night progressed. With that, Golden became the youngest head coach to win a national title since Jim Valvano in 1983.
“I'm just a piece of this puzzle,” Golden said, immediately brushing away any credit for what had just occurred over the previous hours. “I'm proud to be the head coach of Florida. I'm proud of the way our players performed. I'm proud of the way our staff prepared our guys to become national champions.”
Now, the night in San Antonio is much quieter. Few wander outside the Alamodome and along the Riverwalk, but the Gators — and their fans down in Gainesville — are surely celebrating, and deservingly so. It was a renaissance. After eight years of college basketball irrelevance, 11 away from the Final Four and 18 since its last national championship, Florida is atop the college basketball world.
This was all but expected. Entering the year outside of the top 25 in KenPom — a widely utilized and respected college basketball metric site — a successful season would’ve been another step forward, winning the program’s first NCAA Tournament game since 2021.
So instead, Florida won 36 games, the second-most in program history. It toppled the top team in the nation three times, including a program-defining Final Four win against Auburn only two days ago. It secured an SEC Tournament championship for the first time in over a decade. It even witnessed its sole player in program history earn first-team All-American honors, as Clayton Jr. swept nearly every national outlet’s postseason release.
And now, Florida checks the final box on its redemption grocery list: a national championship.
“We got the basketball program back where it belongs,” Golden said, surrounded by his team on the court after the game. “They compete and they find a way to win. They’re winners, and they continue to find a way to win.”
With thousands lining the streets of Gainesville on Monday, viewing amid the pouring rain, a program that should consistently dance among the powerhouses of college basketball rose to prominence again. A message was broadcast, ringing from the confetti-littered court of the Alamodome to the drenched rooftops back home:
Florida basketball is back.
As Golden concluded his media availability and wandered back into the locker room, where he’d undoubtedly get sprayed with champagne, it finally hit him.
“National champion?” he asks after the NCAA official refers to him as such while leaving the stage.
“Sounds pretty good.”
Contact Noah White at nwhite@alligator.org. Follow him on X @noahwhite1782.
Noah is a Spring 2025 Assistant Sports Editor and Copy Desk Chief. He's a second-year journalism major who enjoys reading and shamefully rooting for Tennessee sports teams. He is also a Liberty League Women's Soccer expert.
