SAN ANTONIO — March Madness it is, after all.
A relatively mundane men’s NCAA Tournament was playing to script late Saturday night at the Alamodome, another boring double-digit Duke win to digest, leaving us with faint hopes of Florida phenom Walter Clayton Jr. hitting enough circus shots against the Blue Devils to make Monday memorable.
But you can’t bury this tournament until the last second of the last game ticks away. Clearly, the same is true of Kelvin Sampson’s Houston Cougars. Down 64-55 with 125 seconds left, in a game they trailed by 14 just a few minutes earlier, in a game they led for three minutes and change all night, in a game that was destined for Duke 72, Houston 59 or some such final score … they won.
They won? That game? Against that team, by some measures one of the best in the sport’s history?
It’s an all-time stunner. It’s a redefined tournament, to be decided Monday by … Florida and Houston. And the looks of disbelief on the faces of Cooper Flagg and the Blue Devils walking off the court brought to mind … the Houston Cougars. Of 1983.
For those who need a history lesson, that was an all-time great college basketball team. Phi Slama Jama. Hakeem Olajuwon (he spelled it Akeem then) at center. Clyde Drexler at shooting guard. That’s two of the sport’s top 50 players of all time. Plus several other NBA players, coached by Guy Lewis, destined to win it all after outlasting a loaded Louisville team in the national semifinals.
NC State, which barely got into the tournament, awaited in the title game, and though the late Jim Valvano’s team continued to play beyond the limitations the balance of the regular season had placed on it, Houston led 52-45 late.
Then NC State won 54-52, Lorenzo Charles dunking a Dereck Whittenburg airball as time expired.
There’s no comparison, of course, between Valvano running all over the place looking for someone to hug and Sampson deadpanning to sideline reporter Tracy Wolfson right after Saturday’s dramatic reversal went final, “We weren’t 34-4 playing in the toy poodle league.”
That game comes up because this was the same kind of game. You never felt like Houston would ever actually get over the hump on Saturday. Or even make it dramatic. It comes up because that Houston team, and the one that lost a year later in the 1984 title game to Georgetown, after making the school’s third straight Final Four, have a case as the best this tournament has seen with no titles to show for it.
So now Houston, in its seventh Final Four and third championship game, can finally win this sucker. And in its home state, less than 200 miles from campus.
Also, plant Flagg and the Jon Scheyer-coached 2024-25 Duke Blue Devils squarely on the list of best teams to not win this tournament. Flagg’s top competition for national player of the year awards, Auburn senior forward Johni Broome, also was sent home Saturday, because Clayton was the best player on the floor. Auburn, by the way, was this tournament’s No. 1 overall seed.
But Duke was the best team. That was clear. Unlike the other three teams in San Antonio, Duke has several surefire future NBA players, starting of course with destined No. 1 overall pick Flagg. This Duke team has length, athleticism, shooting, defense, everything. This Duke team is the second-most efficient the sport has seen since Ken Pomeroy started tracking efficiency in the 1996-97 season.
The only team better was Mike Krzyzewski’s 1998-99 Duke team, which now stands right next to this one among the greatest teams to never win it all. That KenPom all-time top 10 includes two others that walked away from the Final Four with no trophy: 2014-15 Kentucky and 2020-21 Gonzaga.
This team had a win all but locked up, which the ’99 Blue Devils (against UConn in the title game), ’15 Wildcats (against Wisconsin in the semis) and ’21 Zags (against Baylor in the title game) could not say about the losses that eliminated them.
Some of the chalk that has defined this tournament got lost in a poof of smoke late Saturday. Duke made critical mistakes. Houston made gobs of clutch plays. Official Keith Kimble made an over-the-back call on Flagg that was, to be kind, of the ticky-tack variety. They all combined to give the 2025 tournament a game that will endure long past 2025.
A haze of disbelief hung in the air in the Alamodome long after the teams had retreated to their locker rooms. “What just happened?” summarizes every conversation among reporters trying to sort through the game’s final moments. Then Scheyer, Kon Knueppel and a tearful Flagg ended the night taking questions, Scheyer summarizing as such: “It’s heartbreaking. It’s incredibly disappointing. There’s a lot of pain that comes with this. That’s what the tournament is all about.”
And it isn’t always won by the best team. That’s part of its charm, and we’ve been low on charm this year. Not that the tournament is teeming with it all of a sudden. It’s probably worth remembering that the 2024-25 Houston Cougars are the sixth-best KenPom team of all time. This ain’t Jimmy V’s Cardiac Pack.
“I try just to listen to Coach Sampson, and he believed we were the best team in the tournament,” LJ Cryer said after scoring 26 of his team’s 70 points against Duke. “So that’s the only person I listened to.”
We’ll see if the Cougars can make that claim in the end. As painful as this was for Duke, there won’t be much difference for Houston if it follows up the indelible mark it just left on this tournament by failing to win it.
(Photo: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)
