SAN ANTONIO — Once, twice, three times the Wilson Evo NXT basketball bounced, untouched, alone. The game was ending, the season was ending, it felt like the world was ending in the Alamodome—and the deciding possession was suddenly in surreal limbo. An electric and dramatic Final Four, one of the best ever, dissolved into an awkward anticlimax.
The ending felt all wrong.
Houston Cougars guard Emanuel Sharp needed a teammate to come get the loose ball that bounced in front of him. None could get there. Trailing the Florida Gators by two points, Sharp had risen for a three-pointer with 4.5 seconds left—except he never shot the ball.
Florida star Walter Clayton Jr., who had momentarily lost contact with Sharp, came flying out at him when he left the ground. Sharp’s teammate, J’Wan Roberts, could have screened Clayton but instead moved his body in front of the person who was guarding him, Alex Condon. Clayton contested the would-be shot with his left hand while soaring past Sharp’s right side, avoiding contact.
Sharp momentarily froze, dropping the ball to the ground instead of launching the shot. Maybe Clayton would have blocked it, but even that would have been preferable to this. Having made that difficult and ultimately regrettable decision, he followed it with a smart one—if Sharp grabbed the ball, it would have resulted in a traveling violation.
So he let the orange orb bounce.
And bounce.
And bounce.
The clock ticked.
Houston fans, with a long history of Final Four heartbreak, looked on in horror.
Sharp boxed Clayton away from the ball while desperately waiting for help to arrive. Houston forward Ja’Vier Francis did not react as quickly as Condon, his Florida counterpart, who made a full-body dive to grab the loose ball. A Cougars team that is built on effort was outhustled on that urgent final play.
By the time Condon secured it, the game was over. Florida had won, 65–63. And now it could be argued that Fred Brown and Chris Webber have the saddest of NCAA tournament company.
Brown, a Georgetown Hoyas guard, made the pass in the 1982 title game to North Carolina Tar Heel James Worthy, a peripheral-vision gaffe of epic proportion. Webber, the star Michigan Wolverines forward, called the timeout his team didn’t have at the end of the ’93 championship game against North Carolina.
Sharp’s play was not as bad as those—credit Clayton’s defense for causing his indecision, whereas the Brown and Webber plays were unforced errors. But failing to get off a shot when there was no choice but to shoot the ball will live in Houston’s nightmares forever. This might not have been quite as brutal as losing a national championship to an air ball-turned-dunk at the buzzer in 1983, but it’s not far off.
“Incomprehensible in that situation we couldn’t get a shot, couldn’t get a shot,” Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said. “At the end, you’ve got to get a shot. Got to do better than that. … Probably should have shot-faked that.”
Sampson had said earlier in this Final Four that his team relied on “unscripted points”—produced more with rebounding or defense than crisply executed offensive plays. This final possession of a great 2024–25 season became a descent into unscripted hell.
Immediately after The Shot That Wasn’t, ecstasy and agony exploded in the Alamodome.
Clayton, the Final Four Most Outstanding Player, untucked his jersey and leaped into the arms of big man Thomas Haugh, mouth agape. The Florida bench erupted onto the floor.
Meanwhile, Sharp barely moved from the spot where he dropped the ball. He squatted down, staring at the floor, with his fists pressed against his forehead for a long while—long enough that Clayton doubled back to the scene to console him. Francis also tended to his teammate. Sampson walked off the floor toward the locker room without so much as a word to Sharp, or even a glance in his direction.
Two nights after his team made all the right plays in a miraculous rally to shock the Duke Blue Devils, Sampson’s Cougars became catastrophically un-clutch. They dissolved into a mistake-prone puddle, turning the ball over on their last four possessions—one by forward JoJo Tugler, one by guard L.J. Cryer and then the final two by Sharp.
Florida did its part to cause the turnovers. Guard Will Richard, who saved the Gators from possibly being run out in the first half, stripped Sharp for the penultimate turnover. Haugh knocked the ball loose from Cryer. Grabbing hands pried the ball loose from Tugler after he had yanked down an offensive rebound.
“Just great down the stretch, how hard we played defensively,” Condon said.
For Florida, winning its first national championship since 2007 required a role reversal of sorts. A team that thrives playing at a high tempo, scoring 77 or more points in each of its last 18 games, had to win a slog that was contested at Houston’s preferred tempo. A team that ranks second in the nation in offensive efficiency, per Ken Pomeroy’s metrics, had to rely on its defense. A team that had been carried by Clayton for the past two games needed a more well-rounded approach Monday night.
In doing those things, Florida proved its well-rounded excellence.
“Obviously, we have an incredibly talented group, one of the most talented groups individually in America,” coach Todd Golden said. “I do think 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. Because of that, we can call each other national champions for the rest of our lives.”
At age 39, 30 years younger than Sampson, Golden now becomes the ninth-youngest coach to win a national title—he looked downright adolescent in the postgame news conference with his championship hat on backward and one of the nets around his neck. But he’s also the youngest to do it since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985.
Golden probably aged significantly during this season, due to a self-inflicted situation that remains largely unexplained publicly. Florida initiated a Title IX investigation for alleged stalking and harassment by Golden, a story that broke just as the season was starting in early November. By late January, the school closed the Title IX investigation and said it found no evidence to support the allegations.
“After a thorough investigation that included dozens of interviews over the past months, the University of Florida has found no evidence that Golden violated Title IX,” a Florida spokesman said. “The Title IX office has closed its investigation.”
Even with that investigation hovering over the season, the Gators established themselves as a great team early on. They rolled to a 13–0 start, then navigated the loaded Southeastern Conference with a 14–4 league mark. Florida established itself as one of the teams to beat in the Big Dance by storming through the SEC tournament and locking up a No. 1 seed.
But the next six games would be no waltz. Time and again, the Gators found themselves trailing in the second half and needing to mount comebacks.
The UConn Huskies, two-time reigning champions, had them on the ropes in the second round before the Gators closed with a flourish in the final four minutes. The Texas Tech Red Raiders had Florida under extreme duress in the regional final, leading by nine points with three minutes to play. The Auburn Tigers had the Gators down nine in the second half in the national semifinals.
And then there was Monday night. Playing at that Houston-friendly pace, the Cougars pushed the advantage as high as 12 points with 15½ minutes to play.
“I just didn’t feel like we had much control of the game,” said Golden, and he’s right. Florida led for a total of 63 seconds all night. But it only matters who leads at the end, and once again, the Gators made the requisite plays to ensure that it would be them.
“They put us through this way too much already,” said Clayton’s mom, Cherie Quarg, who was calmer than usual during this drama-drenched tournament run. “So, yeah, I was like, ‘Let’s go.’ I cried it all out before we got here earlier. Very, very emotional.”
Her son had been unrated as a recruit growing up in Florida, overlooked because he’d been a more established football prospect. His college career began at mid-major Iona, where then coach Rick Pitino watched a workout that was livestreamed during the pandemic and declared Clayton, “Fat, slow and can’t shoot … but he can pass.”
But Clayton morphed into a standout his second season with Pitino, making him a coveted transfer prospect. He considered following Pitino to St. John’s, but instead decided to come back home. The key move by Golden: flying to New York to see Clayton within a couple of hours after he’d visited St. John’s.
“It was very smart of them, how they got to see me as soon as, basically, I left St. John’s,” Clayton said. “Only a couple hours, got up there, got to dinner. I was able to spend like three hours reflecting on [the] Florida visit, St. John’s visit, thinking about some things, some family stuff also. I ended up committing that night.”
Clayton’s progression continued at Florida, as did that of his teammates. Golden is a whip-smart analytics nerd who can crunch numbers with the best of them in the sport, but he’s also got an astute eye for talent and a gift for developing players.
Clayton averaged 17.6 points as a junior and upped it to 18.5 this season, becoming Florida’s first first-team AP All-American with a gift for fading, leaning, seemingly off-balance three-point shooting. He was at his transcendent best in leading the comebacks against Texas Tech and Auburn, scoring 30 and 34 in the Elite Eight and national semifinal, respectively. That made him the first player since Larry Bird in 1979 to score 30 or more in those two rounds.
Monday night was a slog for Clayton against Houston’s vicious defense. He didn’t score in the first half, and didn’t make his first field goal until fewer than eight minutes remained. But Richard rose to the occasion in the first half, scoring 14 points. And big men Condon and Haugh made several key plays, showing their mettle after suffering some ugly moments earlier in the game.
The final three Florida points, reversing a 63–62 deficit, came at the foul line, courtesy of Alijah Martin and Denzel Aberdeen. Then the Gators simply had to hunker down and guard one more time.
It came down to Clayton flying through the air to defend without fouling—just one more smart decision in a career full of them. Football or basketball? He chose hoops and became great. Where to attend college? Playing for Pitino is never a bad introduction to college basketball. Transferring? Leaving New York to come back home worked out perfectly.
The unfortunate person on the other end of Clayton’s last great play was Sharp, who had been one of Sampson’s hardiest warriors this season—until the end. Sharp shot 40.7% from three-point range, but was 1-of-7 against the Gators. But it was the shot he didn’t take that he’ll live with forever.
When Sharp finally pulled himself upright, he held his hand over his mouth as he left the court. Teammate Mylik Wilson pulled his jersey over his head. Cryer, the Cougars’ leading scorer, took his jersey off and draped it atop his head.
In the stands, Houston fans slowly absorbed the impact of a seventh Final Four appearance without a national title. Houston is probably the most accomplished program to never win a national title. Throughout college basketball history, the Cougars have habitually been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Their great teams of 1966–67 and ’67–68, powered by future Hall of Famer Elvin Hayes, ran into the only superior team and superior big man: Lew Alcindor and the UCLA Bruins. Houston was a combined 58–6 those two seasons but lost to UCLA in the Final Four both times.
From 1979 to ’85, the NCAA tournament exploded in popularity thanks to a succession of spectacular Final Fours that featured several famous names and games—the run began with Bird vs. Magic and ended with the Villanova Wildcats’ “perfect game” to upset the Georgetown Hoyas. Houston’s footnote during that time was being a three-time Final Four participant and zero-time champion.
The “Phi Slama Jama” teams from 1981–82 through ’83–84 were a prominent part of that golden era, a dazzling and colorful group that played above the rim with Hall of Famers Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon. Here is what beat Phi Slama Jama: In ’82, it was the North Carolina Tar Heels featuring coach Dean Smith, Michael Jordan, James Worthy and Sam Perkins in the semifinals; in ’83, it was a North Carolina State Wolfpack air ball that serendipitously fell into the hands of Lorenzo Charles for a walk-off dunk in the title game; and in ’84, it was tower of power Patrick Ewing and Georgetown in the title game.
More recently, Sampson got the Cougars back to the Final Four in 2021. There they ran into the Baylor Bears, an underrated wagon of a team, rolling through a strange pandemic season and tournament. The Bears went 28–2 and beat every NCAA tourney opponent by at least nine points.
Now this. Now The Shot That Wasn’t. Sampson was on the verge of becoming the oldest coach to win a national title. Then he was walking off with an unimaginable defeat.
“I wanted it so bad for him,” said sixth-year senior Roberts, the heart and soul of the Houston program. “So, so, so bad. And it hurts. This will be my last time wearing my jersey, and I feel terrible.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Frantic Final Play Bounces Florida’s Way to Seal National Title, Continue Houston’s Heartache.
