By: Robert Craft

TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services

The Florida Gators are the national champion after a 65-63 win over Houston.

At a glance, it looks like everyone just left a time machine.

A 30-something former college point guard with one stopover as a mid-major coach takes over and eventually puts together a deep, balanced roster that’s remarkably efficient on both ends of the floor. A title follows.

Florida forced four turnovers in the last two minutes. The title was won on a stop and a scramble for a loose ball as time ran out. The defense displayed dominance during the most critical point in the game.

The two-point final margin? It matched the Gators’ largest lead of the night. Florida scored the second-fewest points they had all year in the championship game. Their comeback (a third in a row in this event)  tied for the third-largest comeback in men’s championship game history.

This version of Florida does have some conspicuous differences from the one Billy Donovan first led to the pinnacle in 2006, nine years after arriving from Marshall.

Today’s head coach obsesses over data and analytics and unflinchingly runs a system with origins in the Ivy League in the most obsessively competitive athletic conference in the country.

Walter Clayton Jr., the inaugural first-team All-American in program history and the Final Four Most Outstanding Player — was a four-star football prospect who started at Iona as a good passer that was “a little bit heavy,” in the estimation of his coach, Rick Pitino.

All things considered, cutting the net would’ve been easier. This NCAA Tournament has made one thing abundantly clear: There is no Venn diagram, ever, in which “easy” and Walter Clayton Jr.’s name overlap.

How does anyone explain a former zero-star recruit winning most outstanding player in the toughest Final Four of all time? So perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that as Clayton ascended a ladder , scissors in hand, he went to snip at a championship net … only to realize he didn’t need to.

Twenty minutes later, Clayton made a beeline to celebrate with the people he’d come to Florida with in the first place. Kindly requesting no questions or other distractions.

This group raised the trophy after conquering the most loaded Final Four in history, and the Gators are another unified team assuring that they will be among the favorites to do so again next spring.

Florida will lose very important cogs like Clayton, Martin, and two assistants. Golden’s de facto offensive and defensive coordinators accepted head coaching jobs elsewhere.

Florida still might be the preseason No. 1 and should be among the top contenders for the 2026 national title.

Finally, the ambition of Coach Golden has never been terribly difficult to measure, which means the Billy Donovan comparisons may run even deeper.

Florida is the first and only program to win three National Championships in both football and basketball.