- Gators erase 12-point deficit to beat Cougars 65-63
- Cougars denied again after near misses in 1983, 1984
- UF win third NCAA championship, first since 2007
The Gators looked cooked. Down 12. Their All-American guard scoreless. The crowd inside a hangar-like 70,000-seat football stadium, just 198 miles down the road from Houston’s campus, was a deafening sea of scarlet red.
And yet Florida found a way. In one of the most dramatic NCAA men’s championship games in recent memory, the Gators and Walter Clayton Jr overcame Houston’s suffocating defense to pull off an astonishing 65–63 victory on Monday night – a national title game thriller not decided until Florida’s own defense sealed it at the buzzer.