Florida Didn’t Lose The National Championship

The end of Monday's NCAA National Championship Game between Florida and Houston had brief moments of retrograde brilliance but ended as an entirely justified mess. This can reasonably be said of many if not most college basketball games, but in this last college basketball game of the season there was one reason that superseded all the others. 

It's what we always say—when you want something done as badly as possible, get Ted Cruz on your side. If Florida backers don't run him some NIL money, they will become nationally infamous for their ingratitude.

But enough heartwarming fantasy. We called it an "entirely justified mess" because the final was played that way from the start—as an homage to the actual rather than the stereotyped Big East of the 1980s, in which the central aim for every team was not "playing our game"—the concept only sort of existed—but "not letting those guys play theirs." It felt almost from the start like every possession would be won by the defense, and early on the overwhelming heroes were the more obstinate Cougars. Between blocking every other Florida shot and not letting the Gators star guard Walter Clayton Jr., score for the first 25 minutes, Houston looked by far the better and more stubborn side, and very much like a team that could ride that stubbornness to a championship. Florida, for its part, looked foul- and technical-foul-prone and arrhythmic, even overmatched, but two out-of-context rallies erased 10- and 12-point leads that could have broken the game open. You may be detecting some subtle notes of foreshadowing on the palate here.

That drift ended midway through the second half, when Florida, seemingly out of alternate solutions, decided to use Houston's obstinacy as its own creation. The Gators turned their own early foul trouble into Houston's problem later, and if there wasn't a single moment that the viewer could glom onto as The Moment That Changed Everything, there was also the incongruous last possession that explained everything that had preceded it.

Houston was down two, and inbounding the ball. The outlines of the play, such as they are legible, suggest that the Cougars were looking to win it all in regulation. Emanuel Sharp, trying to maneuver for a last-second game-tying-or-better shot, got caught jumping and then bailed in the face of a comprehensive closeout by Clayton, who had come alive on offense in the second half before he made the most important play of the season on the other end. Sharp simply didn’t shoot the shot he’d lined up in order to avoid an all-but-certain blocked shot, and so the ball just … bounced there, untouched, during two of the last three seconds of the college basketball season. 

Sharp chose in that moment not to pick it up; to do so would have meant a traveling call and a turnover, and an instant end to Houston’s season. Instead, the Cougars got the more excruciating version, and the shot to make history one way or the other simply never happened; Florida big Alex Condon eventually won the scrum and handed it off to Clayton just before the buzzer sounded. Florida won not with a heroic deed but by chasing down a seemingly radioactive loose ball—not so much a turnover as an abandonment. A game could have saved an off-putting and exceedingly chalky tournament with a decisive death-or-glory moment instead fizzled to an unsatisfying end. The prototypical One Shining Moment should never happen on Saturday, yet here we are.

But where is "here," exactly? Well, the most upset-light tournament in recent memory forces us to reconsider one of the enduring traditions of the tournament—the plucky underdog in the ascendant. The superior seed won 49 of the 60 games leading into the Final Four and only one double-digit seed—Arkansas and its antediluvian coach John Calipari—reached the second weekend. While that should allow the selection committee a level of normally unjustified smugness, it also underlines that part of the joy of the tournament comes from the committee being made to look silly, stupid, and just dead wrong in public. The reductive nature of the new college sports landscape may not be fully proven yet, but a bracket full of chalk sucks a lot of the whimsy that has always been essential to the tournament’s appeal. Without that, you’re just left with the industrialized horror of a tidy bracket and, well, a bunch of college basketball. In this state, it is hard to elevate it to something more than an acquired taste for the hardcores.

With so many customers disoriented or flat bummed out by the early effects of the transfer portal, the uncertain nature of NIL and conference realignment and the general shift to a more concentrated map, it would have been useful for the tournament to have provided significantly more memorable surprises than Houston-Duke. On that front, it largely failed. A tournament that can't surprise should at least be able to dazzle, and there was little of either.

Even the women's tournament, which was nearly as chalky, wasted its best game in the second round, Maryland's 111-108 double overtime win over Alabama. The final weekend of the women’s bracket produced victory margins of 24, 17, and 23 points; the better seed went 54-8. The correct team, Connecticut, won and for all the correct reasons—see Bueckers, Paige and Strong, Sarah—but they were far less a two-seed than a fifth one-seed; they won their six tournament games by an average of 33 points. At least there, one could detect the greatness the Huskies emanated, even if Charles Barkley referred to Azzi Fudd as "Aziz" during the men's pregame show. In fairness, he's mangled worse names in worse ways.

In all, the college basketball season ended not so much with a definitive thud as with a vexing absence—where there should have been a big moment, there was nothing at all. It ended with a deserving champion, as it generally does, but not one that will be referred to often nor with much fondness outside of Gainesville. But there is this—Florida will always have Ted Cruz’s accursed presence to thank. That is its own reward, for those inclined to hate, and its own punishment.