Sports

Florida ends UConn’s bid for third straight national title with 77-75 March Madness win

Published

3 days ago

March 24, 2025

RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — For 30 minutes, UConn showed the mettle and toughness that delivered back-to-back national championships for Dan Hurley, outplaying top-seeded Florida in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.

And then Walter Clayton Jr. took over.

The Gators’ first-team All-America guard scored 13 of his 23 points in the final eight minutes on Sunday, including two crucial 3-pointers down the stretch, and Florida rallied to a scintillating 77-75 victory over the Huskies, ending UConn’s pursuit of a third straight title.

Florida (32-4) advanced to the Sweet 16 for the first time since 2017 and will play Colorado State or Maryland in the West Region semifinals in San Francisco.

“This is a great win for our program,” coach Todd Golden said. “The time was now for us to take that next step. Again, Florida basketball, back where it belongs. Being in the Sweet 16 is a great step in the right direction. … We made winning play after winning play down the stretch in the last six minutes.”

There’s little doubt about that.

But they also had help from the Huskies, who made some uncharacteristic mistakes, including twice allowing the Gators to corral offensive rebounds off missed free throws, resulting in four second-chance points.

The Huskies (24-11) came in with modest outside expectations as a No. 8 seed but led for most of the second half. During his postgame news conference, Hurley struggled several times to hold back tears.

“This was just historic run that these guys have been on and the guys that have worn the uniform the past couple years,” Hurley said. “If it’s going to come to an end for us, I wouldn’t have wanted it to be in a game where we lost to a lower seed.

“There’s some honor, I guess, in the way that this went down.”

UConn was seeking to become the first team to three-peat since UCLA’s run of seven straight titles from 1967-73.

The Huskies won the 2023 title in Houston and last year in Glendale, Arizona, joining Duke (1991-92) and Florida (2006-07) as the only schools to win back-to-back since the Bruins’ run under John Wooden.

Florida entered the game as a 9 1/2-point favorite and ranked No. 1 in KenPom’s adjusted offensive efficiency by scoring 128.9 points per 100 possessions, and the Gators of the powerful Southeastern Conference joined fellow 1-seed Duke as the only teams to rank in the top 10 on both sides of the ball, making them a popular pick to cut down the nets.

But the Huskies’ defense stymied Clayton and company for most of the game, holding Florida to 35% shooting through the first 30 minutes to build a 52-46 lead.

The Gators chipped away and then Clayton showed why he’s one of the best players in the country.

He made a 3 from the right wing with 2:54 left to put Florida ahead 62-61, and teammate Will Richard followed with a steal and dunk. Clayton’s 3 from the same spot with 1:06 left made it 70-64 — part of a 14-3 run that gave Florida an eight-point advantage with 40 seconds left.

Champs battle to the buzzer

Even when Florida seemed to have the game in hand, UConn kept fighting. Thomas Haugh’s two free throws with 5.9 seconds left pushed the Gators’ lead to five to seal the win.

Hurley watched, arms folded, standing on the sideline as Liam McNeeley’s 3-pointer at the buzzer sailed skyward and dropped through the net as the horn sounded.

Afterward, Clayton thanked his teammates for believing in him after his rough start.

“We knew this game wasn’t going to be easy,” Clayton said. “(UConn) has got a championship pedigree, back-to-back champions. That’s a great team. They had that experience. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy. We kept our composure.”

McNeeley led UConn with 22 points, and Alex Karaban scored 14. Alijah Martin contributed 18 points for Florida and Richard had 15.

Takeaways

UConn: A major rebuild is in store for the Huskies, who struggled to replace losing four starters to the NBA last season.

Florida: The Gators took a huge step forward. Golden has resurrected the program in a span of three years, but he had never won a March Madness game before this year.

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AP March Madness bracket: https://apnews.com/hub/ncaa-mens-bracket and coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/march-madness Get poll alerts and updates on the AP Top 25 throughout the season. Sign up here.

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Skenes highlights MLB opening day starter list as youngest since ’14 to take mound to begin season 2014.

Published

8 minutes ago

March 27, 2025

Austin Reed

Pittsburgh right-hander Paul Skenes, the reigning National League Rookie of the Year award winner, will be the youngest pitcher in 11 years to start a season opener when he takes the mound for the Pirates next week.

Skenes will be 22 years and 302 days old on March 27 when Pittsburgh plays at Miami. José Fernández of the Marlins was 21 years and 243 days old when he opened the 2014 season. In its annual announcement of the opening day starters, most of which had been already informally confirmed by their clubs during spring training, Major League Baseball also revealed Tuesday that Skenes will be the fastest first overall draft pick to make an opening day start.

Skenes was drafted by the Pirates in 2023. Mike Moore was the first selection by Seattle in 1981 and started opening day for the Mariners in 1984, and Stephen Strasburg was the top pick by Washington in 2009 and made his first opening day start for the Nationals in 2012.

Three natives of Japan got the nods for their openers, the most in MLB history. Shota Imanaga of the Chicago Cubs and Yoshinobu Yamamoto of the Los Angeles Dodgers were the starters for the grand opener in Tokyo earlier Tuesday, a 4-1 win for Yamamoto and the Dodgers. Yusei Kikuchi will also start for the Los Angeles Angels on March 27 against the Chicago White Sox. Seven other Japanese-born players have previously started season openers: Shohei Ohtani, Yu Darvish, Kenta Maeda, Masahiro Tanaka, Hiroki Kuroda, Daisuke Matsuzaka and Hideo Nomo.

Two teams have yet to declare their opening day starter: Arizona and Cleveland. Diamondbacks manager Torey Lovullo said he’s deciding between newcomer Corbin Burnes and Zac Gallen for the road game against the Cubs. Guardians manager Stephen Vogt has yet to commit, but all signs point to Tanner Bibee, who pitched in a Cactus League exhibition game on Monday that lines up his rest schedule to be ready for the March 27 game against Kansas City.

With the Cubs and Dodgers getting a head start, the 28 other teams will open on March 27. Four of the opening day starters will make their debuts with a new team: Garrett Crochet with Boston, Clay Holmes with the New York Mets, Luis Severino with the Athletics and Kikuchi with the Angels.

The others are Carlos Rodón (New York Yankees), Freddy Peralta (Milwaukee), José Berríos (Toronto), Zach Elfin (Baltimore), Nathan Eovaldi (Texas), MacKenzie Gore (Washington), Zach Wheeler (Philadelphia), Cole Ragans (Kansas City), Framber Valdez (Houston), Hunter Greene (Cincinnati), Logan Webb (San Francisco), Michael King (San Diego), Chris Sale (Atlanta), Sean Burke (Chicago White Sox), Sandy Alcantara (Miami), Sonny Gray (St. Louis), Pablo López (Minnesota), Tarik Skubal (Detroit), Logan Gilbert (Seattle), Shane McClanahan (Tampa Bay) and Kyle Freeland (Colorado).

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AP MLB: https://apnews.com/hub/MLB

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Sports

Play Ball! Season Starts With Problems

Published

44 minutes ago

March 27, 2025

Austin Reed

Goodbye Oakland

The regular season begins.

The Major League Baseball season begins almost in the same manner as it ended on October 30^th, 2024. There are questions about the future of John Fisher’s Athletics franchise and the Tampa Bay Rays’ business. It appears that a stadium issue in Phoenix between Arizona politicians and the ownership of the Arizona Diamondbacks may be settled soon with Arizona politicians ready to fork over money to fix up the Diamondbacks franchise’s Phoenix home field. The stadium situation in Kansas City has not been resolved and the Chicago White Sox ownership may be changing hands so the stadium issue in Chicago may be on hold. The Tampa Bay Rays’ ownership group has no clear direction ahead. The Rays’ business found a temporary solution for not having a St. Petersburg stadium because the roof blew off the facility during Hurricane Milton last October. The team will play games in a minor league baseball facility in Tampa in 2025. What happens in 2026 has not been decided but MLB hopes the St. Petersburg facility will be repaired in time for the 2026 season.

John Fisher’s Athletics business is now located in Sacramento at least for the next three years. Fisher has not yet signed a real deal to build a stadium in Las Vegas because he has not been able to secure all the private financing he needs for the Las Vegas stadium. The price of the stadium is going up and could increase if tariffs are put in place on April 2^nd on items like steel. The Athletics and Rays’ stadium situations have been on MLB’s front burner for years and until those issues are solved, MLB will not go ahead with expansion. The owners and players have two years left on the business’s collective bargaining agreement but the sniping between the two sides has started. MLB has some serious problems.

Evan Weiner’s books are available at iTunes – https://books.apple.com/us/author/evan-weiner/id595575191

Evan can be reached at evan_weiner@hotmail.com

The St. Petersburg ballpark post Hurricane Milton.

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Sweet 16: Gators travel to San Francisco tonight to face Maryland as the Madness continues.

Published

1 hour ago

March 27, 2025

Austin Reed

Florida’s cross-country trip hit a snag Monday.

Coach Todd Golden called his favorite restaurant in San Francisco, Original Joe’s, and got rejected. It didn’t help that he was trying to find space for 17 players, six coaches and at least a dozen more managers and staff.

“They’re too busy. I tried,” Golden said. “They don’t have enough room for the team.”

Golden and the top-seeded Gators (32-4) might have to settle for takeout from the popular Italian-American eatery.

“We’ll figure something out,” he said.

The 39-year-old Golden is counting on the rest of his return trip to Northern California going much smoother — and ending with Florida celebrating the program’s first Final Four in more than a decade.

The Gators play fourth-seeded Maryland (27-8) on Thursday in the Sweet 16 at the Chase Center. It will be a homecoming of sorts for Golden, who played at Saint Mary’s College (2004-08) in nearby Moraga and returned to the Bay Area to coach at San Francisco (2016-22), first as an assistant and then as the head coach for three seasons.

“It’s a handful. It’s a lot,” he said.

His phone has barely stopped buzzing since the Gators rallied past two-time defending national champion UConn, with calls and texts from friends and family members — some looking for tickets and others hoping to line up some time with Golden before his most important game of the season.

“I got a million friends who are like, ‘Hey, do you have 10 minutes for coffee?’ Well, I have 10. But I don’t six different 10s,” Golden said. “Big picture, it sounds great to be able to try to do all these things. But you get there and you’re not going to be able to do that much (stuff).”

Golden has a plan, though. He is inviting those closest to him to Florida’s practice Tuesday and/or walkthrough Wednesday at War Memorial Gym on San Francisco’s campus. The Gators are leaving Gainesville early Tuesday and trying to take advantage of the time difference to practice on the West Coast for a couple days.

“It’s going to be awesome being able to go back,” Golden said. “I’m trying to do everything I can to enjoy it, too.”

Playing better would help.

Florida dominated the first 15 minutes of its NCAA Tournament opener against Norfolk State, leading 51-19 before the Spartans rallied and outscored the Gators the rest of the way. And Golden’s team trailed UConn by six midway through the second half Sunday before wearing the Huskies down and escaping with a 77-75 victory in Raleigh, North Carolina.

“I do feel like it was a little bit of a weight off of our team’s shoulders,” Golden said. “We got the 1 seed, and we played great the first 15 minutes against Norfolk and then we just kind of coasted. And there was pressure going into (UConn). We’ve had an incredible year. But if we’re somehow not able to win this game, I certainly mentally was like, ‘It’s going to be a letdown.’ Like the season’s going to feel like a letdown if we can’t get through this UConn game, which is crazy considering we won 31 games up until that point.

“But that’s the pressure of a 1 seed. That’s the pressure of trying to get a program back to its glory days. And I felt it, and our guys felt that way, especially for the first 30 or so minutes of the game.”

Golden believes his guys played tight early, started pressing after falling behind and made uncharacteristic mistakes along the way. All-American guard Walter Clayton Jr., Alijah Martin and Thomas Haugh bailed the Gators out with several huge plays down the stretch.

“After winning, I do feel like the pin popped the balloon,” Golden said. “We can kind of play loose this week.”

Even if they don’t get to go to Joe’s.