Florida wins the men’s basketball national championship in a nail-biter over Houston

The Florida Gators won the NCAA men’s basketball championship on Monday, defeating the Houston Cougars in a heart-stopping contest that went all the way down to the final play.

The Florida Gators won the NCAA men’s basketball championship on Monday, defeating the Houston Cougars in a heart-stopping contest that went all the way down to the final play. The Gators led for a grand total of 64 seconds in the game and trailed by as many as 12 points with 16:24 to go in the second half. Houston’s vaunted defense held Florida and its star guard Walter Clayton Jr. in check for much of the game. But, as they had so often in this tournament, the Gators came back. Slowly but surely throughout the second half, head coach Todd Golden and his team reeled in the Cougars. As the game got to crunchtime, Florida went on a 15-3 run to come all the way back to tie the game. It wouldn’t be until the final minute that the Gators took the lead for the first time since the opening minutes of the contest. And, in a battle of Florida’s high-flying offense against Houston’s elite defense, it was the Gators’ making the key defensive plays in the final minutes to seal the championship. “Our guys knew that it wasn’t going to be easy. Didn’t panic when it got tough,” Golden said after the game, in which he became the youngest coach to win a national title since the tournament expanded to 64 teams at 39 years old. He added, “They did a great job of never getting too high, never getting too low. When we went down 12 in the second half, we stayed the course. 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.”