College BasketballCollege BasketballKelvin Sampson’s Cougars beat Duke by playing their own weird way; Paige Buckers will get her final title shot; there was no stopping Walter Clayton Jr., and more.
Getty Images/AP Photo/Ringer illustration
By Steven RuizApril 6, 2:42 pm UTC • 14 min
Who shined brightest in the NCAA tournament’s Final Four? Who fell short? Let’s dive into a special edition of Winners and Losers.
Duke had the best roster of the last four teams in the men’s tournament, but it didn’t have the best coach. That title belongs to Kelvin Sampson, who will be coaching for his first national title on Monday after leading Houston to a shocking 70-67 win over Duke in the Final Four on Saturday night.
The Cougars had no business winning that game. It was a total mismatch on paper. Duke had a size advantage, it had more depth, and it had better shooting. There’s more: The Blue Devils had the probable first-overall pick in the upcoming draft, it had a 7-foot-2 center who can switch onto guards, and it had four players in its rotation shooting over 40 percent from 3 … it had, well, everything. But it wasn’t enough against Sampson’s Houston team.
Even after watching the Cougars beat Duke, it’s hard to fathom how they pulled it off. The Blue Devils led by 14 with just over eight minutes to play. They led by six with under 60 seconds left on the clock. But Houston has done this all season. It’s a team that knows how to muck up a game and make shit weird.
“We could not win this game in the 80s,” Sampson said afterwards. “We couldn’t score 80 [against them] but I felt like we could win the game in the high 60s or low 70s … we have to depend on unscripted points a lot of nights. Unscripted points for us is second-chance points. We had 19 second-chance points.”
Basketball is a beautifully complex sport, but the games are sometimes decided by the simplest of factors. Duke, for all its height, couldn’t keep Houston off the glass. The Cougars shot just 37.7 percent from the field but attempted eight more shots than the Blue Devils. That ultimately made the difference, and the Blue Devils’ talent and sophisticated scheme wasn’t enough to make the difference, as Sampson pointed out in his postgame presser.
“What’s the difference between running the most beautiful play in the world [and] somebody comes off a screen and you go, ‘Bravo, great play?’” Sampson asked. “It’s two points! And that’s us. We’re probably an ‘offensive rebound and put it in for two’ [type of team] rather than a ‘run the greatest play ever and have everyone go crazy because you executed something’ [type of team].”
It may feel silly to talk about a Houston team that entered the tournament as a 1-seed as if it were a plucky underdog, but that was the case in this matchup against a peaking Duke team with a cadre of future NBA players in its rotation. As Sampson said, Houston needed to drag Duke into its style of game to have any chance of pulling off the upset. It did, and even still, it needed a perfect final act to pull out the narrow victory.
It’s hard to overstate how talented Duke’s roster was this season. The athletic department, the team’s powerful NIL collective, and the program’s general allure gave third-year head coach Jon Scheyer a team that should have cruised to a national title. Cooper Flagg was the best player in the country, Kon Knueppel might have been the best shooter, and Khaman Maluach is a future first-round pick in the NBA. And those are just the stars. Duke’s supporting cast was also stocked with fringe NBA talents, with Tyrese Proctor, Sion James, Mason Gillis, and Isaiah Evans playing key roles. The Blue Devils had the nation’s most efficient offense, they were an elite defensive team, and they could shoot as well as any team in the country.
When watching the game back, it’s difficult to find many instances where Scheyer could have done things differently to flip the result. Duke missed important free throws, it was on the wrong side of the whistle (for once), and its role players didn’t show up despite getting quality shots. As the Duke coach said after the game, “We did what we wanted to do.” The players executed the game plan. It just wasn’t good enough to put a resilient Houston team away.
Duke’s Jon Scheyer on the loss to Houston
‘We’re wining by six, with 1:15 to go and they made plays..you gotta get them a ton of credit..I’m not about to feel sorry for one second, these guys have done an incredible job’ pic.twitter.com/JlgZIdYdJu
— Trey Wallace (@TreyWallace_) April 6, 2025
Scheyer got star performances from his freshmen, Flagg and Knueppel, but couldn’t get the rest of Duke’s rotation going. Flagg filled up the box score with 27 points, seven rebounds, four assists, three blocks, and two steals. Knueppel scored 16 and grabbed seven boards. And no other Duke player scored in double figures or made more than three shots from the field.
Scheyer has coached well this season, but his late-game play-calling is worthy of criticism. In the few close games Duke played this season, he defaulted to putting Flagg in isolation and just letting Flagg go to work from there.
With Duke trailing by a point and just 19 seconds on the clock, the third-year coach went back to that well once again. And, once again, his star freshman came up dry after bricking a midrange fadeaway from about 17 feet out. Getting the ball in the hands of the best player in the final seconds of a close game is typically the right strategy, but Scheyer has done nothing to make his star freshman’s job easier in those situations. Flagg isn’t some iso aficionado at this point in his development. He’s a fine offensive player who works best in the flow of the offense. You can’t just roll the ball out to him and expect him to get a bucket. But in all of Duke’s losses this season, Scheyer has treated him like one of those guys in crunch time.
Even after falling short of the championship round, Flagg will go down as one of the best freshmen in college basketball history. He was announced as the Wooden Award winner on Friday. Only three freshmen had ever earned the honor before him. He scored 27 in the losing effort and scored 11 of Duke’s last 15 down the stretch. Without him, Duke would have been blown out. And now Flagg is headed to the NBA. Maluach and Knueppel will likely follow him, so Scheyer will have to rebuild this roster on the fly. He’s bringing in the nation’s best recruiting class, led by the Boozer twins, and will certainly add some significant contributors in the portal. But as talented as his projected 2026 roster may be, it’s unlikely he’ll ever be able to put together a roster as talented as the one he helmed this season.
No matter how Monday’s national title plays out, Walter Clayton Jr. has already solidified his spot in March Madness lore. His 34 points on Saturday night paced a Florida team that struggled to find points against a well-trained Auburn squad in the halfcourt. The Gators eventually got going and pushed the pace to their liking, but it was Clayton who kept the team in range for its eventual comeback. That’s been the case for most of the tournament: When the Gators’ half-court offense has been bogged down in the second half of tense games, Clayton has relieved the tension with a run of cold-blooded 3-pointers. After putting away Connecticut and Texas Tech in a similar fashion earlier in the tournament, Clayton pulled off the trick a third time in a 79-73 win over Auburn in Saturday’s Final Four.
I’m not sure if I’ve seen Clayton take a good shot all tournament. At the same time, I’m not sure if he’s capable of taking a bad shot. Every time he lofts up a shot at the rim, I expect it to go in—whether he’s taking a wide-open jumper or a heavily-contested fadeaway.
There is no defense for that. Auburn played an admirable game on the defensive end. They slowed the Gators down, stymied their halfcourt sets with on-ball pressure, and made Clayton work for every opening. It kind of worked. You hardly noticed Clayton on the court for stretches of the game, except for the moments that he carved out enough time and space to get a jumper off. He made good use of those opportunities and got just enough help from guard Alijah Martin to help put away an Auburn team that looked like the title favorites before they sputtered down the stretch of a long SEC season. The Tigers looked finished long before Martin put multiple Auburn defenders on a poster late in the second half, but the dunk ended any hope they had of pulling off a miracle comeback.
In the end, Florida was too big, fast, and talented for a veteran Auburn team that peaked in February. The Tigers couldn’t contain Clayton. They had no one who could run with Martin. And the Gators eventually wore Johni Broome out with their endless supply of big men. It was a close game down the stretch, but it never felt like Auburn really had a chance at winning it.
After all she had done leading up to the Final Four, we’ll give Paige Bueckers a pass for an off night. She scored just 16 points on 7-of-17 shooting and didn’t hit a single 3-pointer in UConn’s win over UCLA. She did come up with three steals but managed only five rebounds and two assists. Bueckers has set a high standard throughout this tournament, and she didn’t come close to meeting it against the Bruins. It just didn’t matter nearly as much as we all would have believed. Even with its best player putting forth a C-minus effort, Connecticut ran the top overall seed off the court and out of the tournament with a resounding 85-51 win on Friday.
Bueckers, who’s still seeking her first title with the Huskies, avoided being at the center of legacy debates on the morning debate shows thanks to an intelligent game plan from her coach (more on that in a minute) and a few standout performances from teammates. Freshman Sarah Strong led the charge with 22 points and eight boards. Strong also held up on the defensive end when she had to defend UCLA’s Lauren Betts down low. The Bruins star has five inches on Strong, but the UConn frosh has the quick advantage and put it to good use when Betts had to defend. Strong did a lot of her damage in the second half when UConn had already built a healthy lead. Azzi Fudd had laid the groundwork for an easy second half by pouring in 19 points over the first 20 minutes. Fudd is a senior but was making her Final Four debut after missing most of the previous two seasons with injuries.
Strong and Fudd picked up Bueckers for one game, but she’ll need to be at her best with South Carolina waiting in the national title game on Sunday. The Gamecocks have too many scoring options to hold down on the offensive end, and Dawn Staley always gets her teams to play tough defense. Staley will also have plenty of capable defenders to throw at Bueckers for 40 minutes. This will be the toughest challenge of Buecker’s season—and maybe her entire career. After Friday’s rout of UCLA, it’s the only thing standing between her and a legacy-cementing championship ring.
Betts dropped 26 points on a Connecticut defense that set out to stymie her with myriad looks, including double and triple teams on the block. Only Notre Dame’s Hannah Hidalgo scored more in a single game against the Huskies this season than Betts did on Friday night, so putting a nice round number in the scoring column was quite the achievement. But it’s the rest of Betts’s box score line that tells the story behind UConn’s dominant win. Betts blocked only one shot, grabbed just five rebounds, and dished out a single assist. She averaged 2.5 blocks, 9.5 rebounds, and 2.6 assists on the season.
UCLA had been 20-0 when Betts scored at least 20 points going into the game, but UConn coach Geno Auriemma didn’t sell out to stop her from hitting that benchmark. He wanted to keep Betts away from the rim on the defensive end and to force her off balance when she got a post touch. Auriemma let Jana El Alfy defend Betts one-on-one early, just to give her a false sense of comfort on the block. Then he threw double teams from different directions, had off-ball defenders stunt and quickly recover out to shooters, and had undersized defenders front her, forcing tricky over-the-top passes. Betts is impossible to keep off the block, so she was still able to score, but she was unable to make her teammates better. They generated just one made shot off her post-ups, per Synergy. And that was a difficult step-back 3-pointer by Kiki Rice.
UConn’s offensive plan was more straightforward: Auriemma wanted the Huskies to push the pace. When UConn grabbed a rebound or forced a Bruins turnover, it sprinted down the court looking to attack the rim. The goal was to beat Betts down the court before she could set up shop in the paint, where she can protect the rim and haul in rebounds. Connecticut simply didn’t give her a chance to make an impact on the defensive end. Betts dominated in one aspect, but UConn didn’t allow her to dominate the game.
“I thought we executed everything that we set out to do,” Auriemma said after the game. “We had a great game plan, and we play so hard … Whether that transfers over to Sunday remains to be seen. But for one night, I thought we were the best team in the country.”
South Carolina was the one puzzle that Madison Booker and Texas couldn’t solve this season. The Longhorns lost just four games, and three of them came at the hands of the defending champs. Booker, the SEC player of the year, had shot just 29 percent from the field in the first three installments of the series. While she scored 20 in Texas’ lone win over the Gamecocks earlier this season, she scored just 17 total in the two other games.
On Friday, Booker and the Longhorns got one more crack at South Carolina. The result didn’t change … but not for a lack of trying on Booker’s part. She got off to a fast start and showed why she’s drawn comparisons to Kevin Durant. It’s not just the school and the jersey number inspiring those comps. There’s a lot of KD in her game, and South Carolina couldn’t do much to stop her.
Fortunately for Dawn Staley, she never really had to come up with an answer for Booker. The Texas sophomore essentially took herself out of the game with two highly avoidable fouls. She committed her second foul while jogging back on defense when she needlessly bumped into an opponent. That got her parked on the bench for the rest of the first quarter and most of the second. The third foul came in the third quarter when she clumsily ran into a South Carolina player while jumping to catch a full-court pass in transition.
Booker played an efficient game overall, shooting 5-for-11 from the field. But she was hardly on the court and finished with just 11 points in 24 minutes. When Booker was out there, Texas was able to stick with the Gamecocks. But the Longhorns were lost without her. The game quickly got out of hand when she went to the bench with foul trouble.
The depth of talent on Staley’s team just overwhelmed the regular-season SEC champs. Freshman Jordan Lee scored 16 off the bench to help make the score look a bit more respectable, but she was the only Texas player, other than Booker, who looked like they belonged in the game. With the way South Carolina is playing, it’s unlikely Booker would have gotten her revenge had she stayed out of foul trouble, but she didn’t even give herself a chance.
The women’s Final Four was short on drama, but the result is a dream national title matchup between the two best teams in the country. Connecticut has the nation’s best offense and defense, per BartTorvik.com. South Carolina is right behind them with the no. 2-ranked offense and defense. “It does feel like the two most prominent programs right now in women’s college basketball are playing for the right to be national champions,” Auriemma said after his team blew out UCLA on Friday night. “And we both deserve it.” He’s right. This is the matchup every college basketball fan wanted to see in the national championship game. It’s a fitting end to another great season.
Sunday’s game will be a rematch. Connecticut rocked South Carolina in an 87-58 win in February, so the Gamecocks will have plenty of ground to make up. Freshman Joyce Edwards was the lone bright spot for South Carolina in that game. She scored 17 points while no other South Carolina player scored more than 11 in the rout. Edwards was back at it again against Texas in the national semis. She was the best player on the court, on both ends, and looked unfazed by the Longhorns’ vaunted defensive pressure. Staley has four or five scoring options who can take over a game, but she’ll need another strong performance from her star freshman to hang with the favored Huskies.
It will be interesting to see how Staley balances her lineup with scorers and defenders. Guard Raven Johnson doesn’t offer much offense but has been a menace on the defensive end and a leader on the court for South Carolina. Reserves like Edwards and MiLaysia Fulwiley are the team’s most reliable source of points, but don’t have the experience and defensive know-how that Johnson brings to the table. If the Gamecocks fall behind early, I’d expect Edwards and Fulwiley to get most of the burn. If it’s a tight game late, Johnson will be on the court.
With how good South Carolina looked against Texas, I’m willing to look past its lopsided defeat to UConn in February. On Friday, the Gamecocks were playing so well that Staley was able to stop and laugh at Bree Hall after she tripped over her own feet celebrating a 3-point make.
Auriemma’s Huskies will provide a more serious challenge. Bueckers will be the focal point of South Carolina’s defensive game plan, but with Fudd and Strong coming off big games, the Gamecocks can’t just sell out to stop the superstar. It will be interesting to see if Staley takes any extra measures to stop the Huskies’ leading scorer or if she trusts one of her players to take the assignment solo, as Johnson did against Caitlin Clark in last year’s title game.
Bueckers has more help than Clark had at Iowa last season. So even if South Carolina can slow her down, they’ll still need answers for Strong and Fudd, among others. But with the contributions South Carolina is getting from its young roster, a big scoring output from the Huskies won’t be enough to put Staley’s team away. It’s hard to predict which way this game will go. You can forget about the February blowout. This will surely be a tightly contested game between the two best teams in the sport.
Steven Ruiz has been an NFL analyst and QB ranker at The Ringer since 2021. He’s a D.C. native who roots for all the local teams except for the Commanders. As a child, he knew enough ball to not pick the team owned by Dan Snyder—but not enough to avoid choosing the Panthers.
