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 mid-major 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 technical fouls in two separate moments of lost composure, the team with one of the best offenses in the country won with defense.
Florida forced Houston into four turnovers in the last two minutes and change, with the title won 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. Their comeback, a third in a row in this event? It tied for the third-largest in men’s championship game history.
“It happens every time we need it to happen,” said guard Alijah Martin, who hit a pair of go-ahead free throws in the final minute. “We’re built for it. We’re built for the last moments of the game.”
This version of Florida does have some conspicuous differences from the one Billy Donovan first led to the pinnacle in 2006, nine years after arriving from Marshall. This head coach obsesses over data and analytics and unflinchingly runs a system with origins in the Ivy League in the most obsessively competitive athletic conference in the country. This rotation features players who largely weren’t anyone’s first choice, at one point or another, before coalescing into a sandstorm. The best of them all — Walter Clayton Jr., the first first-team All-American in program history and the Final Four Most Outstanding Player — was a four-star football prospect who started at Iona as a good passer that was “a little bit heavy,” in the estimation of his coach there, a guy named Rick Pitino.
And this group raised the trophy after conquering the most loaded Final Four in history. But going by the broad strokes? It’s another unified Florida team winning it all and virtually assuring that it will be among the favorites to do so again next spring.
What happened Monday night was past and prelude all at once. “It’s quite literally the road map that we’re trying to follow,” current Gators big man Micah Handlogten said on the eve of the national championship game.
Indeed, when the old heads have talked about the not-so-secret ingredients to the ’06 and ’07 national titles, they invariably come back to the idea of joyful solidarity, and how it pushed them through. “They played together, they played hard and they had fun doing it,” Gators guard Will Richard said of those back-to-back champions, and the description echoes into 2025. The low moments, for all three groups, felt more like clarity than a hard strike from a chisel.
The 2006 national champions lost a game on Feb. 26 — a third in a row, as it happens — and didn’t lose again.
The 2007 national champions lost a game on Feb. 27 — their second in a row, as it happens — and didn’t lose again.
This season? Florida traveled to Georgia and fell behind by 26. Its comeback effort came up short. The date was Feb. 25.
A win streak of 12 games, from there, finished with a confetti blast Monday night.
“That kind of lit a fire underneath us,” Gators forward Thomas Haugh said, “and we realized we can’t take any games for granted.”
Still, it’s not exactly correct to say this Florida is a mirror image of those Floridas. Mirrors reverse the picture. This Florida is more like a copy pulled out of a 3-D printer and injected with super-soldier serum.
Those Floridas finished their championship seasons ranked third and first, respectively, in offensive efficiency. This Florida went into the national championship game ranked No. 2 nationally in that category … but was also a full six points per 100 possessions better than the top-ranked attack of 2007. Those Floridas played kind of fast, and this Florida played three possessions per game faster than their fastest, while turning the ball over five percent less.
Those Floridas defended slightly better, but only fractionally. Not enough to notice, really. Besides, those Floridas played top-35 schedules. This one faced a top-15 slate. They all ended up in the same place, yes. But in the end, this Florida won more than any version of Florida that preceded it.
The spine was the same, only thicker. “We learned how together their team was,” Haugh said, referencing the lessons gleaned from the back-to-back titelists. “They were one. That correlates a lot with our team this year. Everybody likes everybody on this team. We all kind of go out there and play as one big unit, you know?”
It probably helped the whole operation navigate a situation those previous champions didn’t encounter.
During the 2024-25 season, Florida conducted a four-month long Title IX investigation into allegations of sexual harassment, sexual exploitation and stalking involving multiple women by its men’s basketball coach. In mid-January, ESPN reported a university employee filed a sexual assault complaint to the school’s Title IX office against assistant coach Taurean Green, a former all-SEC point guard on the Gators’ back-to-back national title teams.
In late January, Florida closed its investigation into Golden, saying it found “no evidence” the coach violated Title IX. The Green case remains open. “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,” Golden said during a West Region news conference in late March. “I’ll continue to handle some of those situations after the season’s over, but for now we’re continuing on winning basketball games and trying to make it to the Final Four.”
When Florida did, Golden described it as a bit of a pressure release, at least from the competitive perspective. “Once we got here, we kind of felt like we had the weight of the world off our shoulders,” he said on the day before the national title game. “We made the Final Four, now it’s time to go out and hoop, see what happens.”
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 were completely in the game despite the struggles. Eventually someone made some shots — this time it was Will 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. “Down 12 in the second half, we stayed the course,” Golden said. “We didn’t point fingers, didn’t start to try to make hero plays, gambling defensively. We got rewarded because of that toughness that we displayed.”
Some explosiveness, too, helped solve the 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.
“I felt like if we held Florida under 70 we’d have a chance to win,” Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said. “Saturday (against Duke), we found a way to win. Tonight, maybe not so much.”
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 and had to let it go, lest he be whistled for a travel. It trickled out near halfcourt, where Gators big man Alex Condon corralled it at the end of a mini-frenzy just as time ran out. “It hurt my elbow a little bit, diving for that ball,” Condon said. With that, a second Houston Final Four miracle was undone, and Florida’s return to the mountaintop was confirmed.
“FLORIDA IS BACK ON TOP OF THE COLLEGE BASKETBALL WORLD!” pic.twitter.com/IeLecOAcSb
— CBS Sports (@CBSSports) April 8, 2025
“Incomprehensible in that situation that we couldn’t get a shot,” Sampson said.
Not entirely, given Florida’s advances on that end this season.
“The coaching staff made way more of an emphasis (on defense), saying if we want to be good and be national champions, we gotta be a top-10 defense,” said Condon, alluding to a defense that finished the 2023-24 season 94th in efficiency, per KenPom.com. “There was a general sense in the arena that they couldn’t score on us unless they got to the free-throw line. Once we started doing that, I thought the game was ours. We had elite confidence down the stretch.”
Florida will lose very important cogs like Clayton and 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.”
The Athletic’s Brendan Marks contributed to this story.
(Photo: Sam Hodde / Getty Images)
