“Toughest team wins” unless the toughest team plays Florida

Texas Tech head coach Grant McCasland has a mantra, “toughest team wins.” It’s held true all season as his Red Raiders earned a No. 3 seed in the West Region of the NCAA Tournament, as they escaped a first-round upset scare against UNC Wilmington, and as they stormed back in the Sweet 16 against Arkansas. But after Florida’s come-from-behind 84-79 win to advance to the Final Four, McCasland’s mantra may need to be amended and the walls in Lubbock repainted. 

Yes, the toughest team wins, unless the team on the other side is the Florida Gators with Walter Clayton Jr. 

Texas Tech bullied Florida for 37 minutes, dominating the paint behind Darrion Williams and JT Toppin, and taking a page out of the Gators’ book by pounding the offensive boards. The Red Raiders led 75-66 with just 3:14 between them, a ladder, scissors, and a piece of net. That’s when it happened.

Florida forward Thomas Haugh, who kept the Gators afloat for much of the game with 20 points and 11 rebounds off the bench, grabbed an offensive board and knocked down a three. Then, Todd Golden, who became the first under-40-year-old head coach to reach the Final Four since 2011, called his final timeout to set up a full-court press and seemingly to send Toppin, a 70% free-throw shooter, to the line for a one-and-one. Instead, Haugh got Darian Williams, an 84% shooter, but he missed the front end and set off an avalanche of offense.

Haugh hit another three, Toppin missed the front end of his one-and-one, and Clayton calmly buried a triple of his own: 75-75 with 1:47 remaining. The SEC Champs flipped the switch and the Red Raiders’s 37 minutes of toughness were washed away as quickly as a sandcastle in a hurricane. 

Florida closed on an 18-4 run in the final three minutes with four straight made threes to take the lead with just under a minute left. Texas Tech, which finished 7-13 from the free throw line, was helpless to stop it.

The Gators come at their opponents in waves, but on Saturday night in San Francisco, it felt like a tsunami, an offensive onslaught that invokes images of natural disasters because when they turn it on the destruction is seismic. 

Clayton was phenomenal in the final minutes. The First-Team All-American point guard, finished with 30 points on 7/14 shooting, 13 of those coming in the final 5:24. Between his dagger three to take down the back-to-back national champs in the Round of 32 and his even more impressive performance against an even more formidable opponent with the Final Four on the line, he’s earning a Mariano Rivera-like reputation as a closer. 

No amount of toughness can account for an unflappable shot-maker with the audacity to attempt this shot in the final minutes of the biggest game of his life and the skill to make it.

The big question surrounding Florida’s run through the West Region as the top seed, is if a team like that can hit top speed at any moment, why has it spent much of the NCAA Tournament in first gear? The Gators haven’t been perfect, they narrowly escaped UConn and led Maryland by just two at halftime before pulling away for a 16-point victory. 

Maybe that’s judging against the standard of Dan Hurley’s dominant two-year run when the Huskies laid waste to the entire sport, or maybe it will prove to be a fatal flaw in San Antonio. Either way, that imperfection gave everyone one of the most impressive three-minute displays of basketball in recent memory and seemingly broke an infallible mantra. Or maybe, the toughest team did win. 

Maybe Florida's unwavering belief and trust in its immensely talented roster is a level of mental toughness that the Red Raiders, for all of their brute force, couldn't access. That combination of an impervious attitude and superstar skillset that Clayton and his teammates embody could just be the Gators’ superpower, and maybe it will lead them to a national championship.