Florida is as deserving a national champion as any NCAA competition has ever had. The Gators survived the crucible of the hardest conference in college basketball history, an SEC that placed a record 14 teams in the NCAA Tournament. It won the conference tournament, and then it won an NCAA Tournament that featured all four No. 1 seeds making the Final Four. To even get that far, they had to beat a UConn program that had won the previous two national championships. Every path to a title is brutal, but Florida\u2019s is on the shortlist of the most brutal ever. The team that came back from 12 points down in the second half in Monday\u2019s title game to beat Houston 65-63 did not get any breaks along the way.<\/p>\n
If you are a Florida fan gator-chomping in celebration, you may now use your two previous championship rings from this century to plug your ears. You\u2019ll soon have another one for your finger. Have you plugged them? Good. This was an ugly championship, the opposite of a feel-good story if you are anyone other than a Florida fan. We can say on the one hand that Florida has mastered the new world of college basketball\u2014and acknowledge on the other that the Gators\u2019 title is a sign of good days gone by.<\/p>\n
That judgment isn\u2019t about the Gators\u2019 head coach, though it\u2019s worth mentioning his story up front, if only because the TV broadcasts of Florida\u2019s games down the stretch almost never did. Todd Golden, the 39-year-old in his third year leading the program, was the subject of a preseason Title IX complaint that included detailed allegations<\/a> that he stalked and sexually harassed female students. The university said it dismissed its investigation of Golden in January<\/a> after finding no evidence that the coach had violated Title IX. The school did not say more than that, not that it could, given the circumstances.<\/p>\n Golden was able to move on, and anyone who\u2019d like to ignore the allegations against him will be able to do so easily. The next administrative action Florida takes with Golden will be to offer him a huge contract extension. There\u2019s no sense in comparing the respective moralities of anyone in a college basketball game, though. Whatever your view of Golden, it shouldn\u2019t have hinged on whether he won on Monday.<\/p>\n Instead, Florida\u2019s title is a bummer on basketball terms because of what the Gators\u2019 near-perfection represents. Golden and his staff mastered college hoops roster-building, and they did it in such a rich-getting-richer fashion that it calls into question if the NCAA Tournament you used to love is ever coming back. This is not Florida\u2019s problem; in fact, it\u2019s not anyone\u2019s problem, other than the head coaches of mid-major Division I basketball teams. But it would have been a more just outcome if Duke had won the national championship by simply dominating the tournament with future No. 1 pick Cooper Flagg.<\/p>\n Let me explain. Every college basketball team now relies on the transfer portal for talent. Houston, the team that led Florida almost all night on Monday before frittering the game away, does it. Duke, the program that recruits high school players better than anyone else, does it. The good teams, mediocre teams, and bad teams all do it. Florida just does it in a way that is so ruthless and efficient that you can\u2019t help but notice what it signifies about how college sports are changing. Florida\u2019s best player, guard Walter Clayton, played two years at Iona before the Gators plucked him ahead of last season. Guard Alijah Martin spent four years at Florida Atlantic before joining UF this year. Wing Will Richard, the leading scorer on Monday, started his college career at Belmont before hopping to Gainesville for the last three years.<\/p>\n All of that is very good, actually. Clayton is a superstar, one of the best college guards in a long time, and it is a good thing that his talents have allowed him to choose his landing spot and collect serious money (how much, we don\u2019t know) during his time in college. Martin played an entire career at FAU, and it is a good thing that he was able to spend a year with the Gators, where he had the chance to earn more than he could have ever made playing for an American Athletic Conference school. College sports is a better place because these players had the chance to play out their careers at Florida and win it all. A few of them watched their coaches leave for other jobs, and it\u2019s only right that they could leave too.<\/p>\n March Madness, however, is not \u201ccollege sports.\u201d March Madness is a three-week tournament that got its nickname because of its propensity to deliver several huge upsets every year. March Madness is an entertainment product where I want to be fed popcorn. And the merciless approach of the Gators, and other teams like them, is threatening all of our popcorn supply for future NCAA Tournaments.<\/p>\n This was a chalky tournament, not just with the one-seeds all making it to the Final Four (for just the second time ever) but with only the mildest upsets even cropping up on the opening weekend. The lowest-seeded team in the Sweet 16 was Arkansas, a No. 10 from the dominant SEC. I don\u2019t think we\u2019ve seen enough yet to conclude for sure that mid-majors will never thrive in March again now that their best players can just leave for schools like Florida.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n An Infamous Climber Made History With a Death-Defying Ropeless Summit. Now He\u2019s on to Something Far More Perplexing. <\/p>\n The Oscar Nominations Suggest Best Picture Is Down to Two Movies\u2014and Not the Ones Many Thought <\/p>\n The Most Surprising Oscar Nomination of the Year Is Thrilling Everyone\u2014Even Skeptics of the Movie But I have seen enough to put the \u201cMadness\u201d moniker on probation for a little bit. In a year with no serious upsets to speak of, an SEC team won a stacked tournament with players who, in another year, might have been leading fun tournament runs for universities such as Iona and the more recent Cinderella, FAU. This is not a big enough problem to justify going back to restrictive and likely illegal player movement rules, but it is enough to point out that we may be looking at much more boring basketball tournaments for the foreseeable future. Life has tradeoffs.<\/p>\n Why do I take such a hater\u2019s angle in the aftermath of Florida\u2019s championship, an achievement that deserves celebration? Well, I have no choice, because Florida has made a big deal all season about how it does not have a roster packed with five-star high schoolers. With their win over Houston, the Gators became the first team in the modern era, according to 247Sports<\/a>, to win the championship without a single player who came out of high school in the top 100 of the recruiting rankings.<\/p>\n Golden talked about it on the floor after Florida clinched a Final Four spot: \u201cI don\u2019t care that these guys weren\u2019t highly ranked!\u201d he exclaimed as his players mobbed him. And indeed, they weren\u2019t, but it\u2019s tacky and lampoonable to portray this Florida team as some sort of little engine that could rather than a collection of the best parts from several smaller locomotives that could not afford to keep all of their machinery intact.<\/p>\n Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Florida is as deserving a national champion as any NCAA competition has ever had. The Gators survived the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":555583,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3723],"tags":[7,319,217,420,231,772,1400,1544],"class_list":{"0":"post-555582","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-college","10":"tag-college-basketball","11":"tag-florida","12":"tag-ncaa","13":"tag-ncaa-basketball","14":"tag-ncaa-tournament","15":"tag-ncaab"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nba\/115944810631947216","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555582","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=555582"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/555582\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/555583"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=555582"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=555582"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nba\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=555582"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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