SAN ANTONIO – It wasn’t quite Houston over Duke, but your resident prognosticator is making a late comeback on this final weekend of the 2024-25 college basketball season. For those of you keeping score at home – and you know who you are – my perfect 2-0 record for Saturday’s semifinals has ensured that my NCAA Tournament record will be respectable, though admittedly below sea level. However, no matter what happens tonight, I will be well over .500 against the spread for the season. So if you’ve followed my advice both with these picks as well as with regards to subscribing to Hoops HQ, you have more than made your money back. Plus, you’ve been able to consume all this amazing content. You’re welcome, America!
So it is with great anticipation and wistful regret that I hereby serve up my final pick of the season. I really appreciate all of you coming with me for this fabulous ride. Our content at Hoops HQ won’t include more picks against the spread from me for a while, but there is certainly a lot to cover in the weeks and months ahead.
We are down to Florida and Houston for the chance to win it all. Here is my one shining prediction:
No. 1 Florida vs. No. 1 Houston
Seth’s Analysis
To paraphrase the great Jack Buck, I still can’t believe what I just saw. Houston trailed Duke by 14 points with eight-and-a-half minutes to play Saturday night, by nine with three minutes to play and by six with one minute to play. All the statistical models had the Blue Devils in the high-nineties percentiles to win at that point, but Kelvin Sampson and his Cougars didn’t need no percentiles. They had talent, skill, toughness, resilience, belief and yes, a healthy dose of luck. That’s what it takes to pull off big comebacks against great teams. That’s what it takes to win an NCAA championship.
Now, the Cougars will have to overcome a bit of bad luck because they are facing Florida, although if you’re playing for a title, you’re going to go up against a great team. Duke had all the qualities Florida has except for one – experience. While the Blue Devils were led by freshmen, the Gators rank No. 60 in KenPom’s experience metric. Houston is 39th. And the Gators are built around their senior guard trio of Walter Clayton Jr., Alijah Martin and Will Richard. If Florida loses this game, it won’t because those guys saw something they haven’t seen before.
For all the hype justifiably heaped on Johni Broome and Cooper Flagg this season, Florida’s Walter Clayton Jr. has been the best player in this NCAA Tournament. Just like every other team Florida plays, Auburn had Clayton at the top of its scouting report, yet he was his usual spectacular self on Saturday night, finishing with 34 points on 11 of 18 shooting (5 of 8 from three) to go along with four rebounds and two assists. It will be fascinating to watch Clayton match buckets with Houston’s senior guard L.J. Cryer, who was equally brilliant while scoring 26 points against the Blue Devils, including two clutch late free throws. Whoever wins the battle of these shot makers is going to have an edge.
There is one more asset that Florida brings to this game which Duke did not: A recent history of playing close games against tough competition. This doesn’t just apply to the SEC, which was arguably the most dominant conference in the history of the sport. It also applies to the NCAA Tournament, during which the Gators have had to pull off great escapes against UConn in the second round, Texas Tech in the Elight Eight and Auburn in the Final Four. Duke was pushed a little bit by Arizona in the Sweet Sixteen, but beyond that it had experienced precious little game pressure. The Gators aren’t just familiar with such pressure — they thrive in it.
There’s not much more that can be said about what Kelvin Sampson has done to get Houston to this point, not just in engineering Saturday’s comeback but also in revitalizing this program. Before Sampson took over in 2016, Houston had not won a game in the NCAA Tournament since 1984. Now he is in his second Final Four with Houston, his third in his career (he also took Oklahoma there) and coaching in his first national championship game. We all talk about this team’s grit and toughness, but let’s not forget that it also features some really good basketball players. That was a brutally difficult three-point shot that senior guard Emanuel Sharp drilled in the final minute of the win over Duke. Fun fact: The Cougars lead the nation in there-point shooting at 39.9 percent. Given the way they defend and crash the offensive glass (18 against Duke), that should be against the rules.
The fact that this point spread is so small is indicative of how evenly matched these teams are. So this basically comes down to a coin flip. I think it’s going to come up Gators. Florida has all the intangible qualities in which Houston usually has an advantage. But the Gators have more skill. More important, they’ll have the best player in the game, who by all lights seems to have been born for this shining moment. These are two great teams and anything can happen, but says here that when the confetti falls in the Alamodome on Monday night, it will be blue and orange.
