SAN ANTONIO — It would be an oversimplification to say that Florida is college basketball’s version of Moneyball while Houston runs the sport’s version of the Oklahoma drill in practice. The Cougars also use analytics, and the Gators were rugged enough to wear down Auburn’s Johni Broome.
But with the 69-year-old Kelvin Sampson slated to become the oldest coach to win a Division I men’s basketball title if Houston wins, and the 39-year-old Todd Golden poised to become the youngest coach since Jim Valvano in 1983 to do it if Florida prevails, the men’s NCAA championship matchup features a contrast of styles and philosophies from different eras.
“We’re an elite offensive team, a top-10 defensive team,” Golden said in San Antonio on Sunday. “[Houston is] a top-10 offensive team and elite defensive team. I think it’s going to be a contrasting battle that way.”
All of this is best captured through each team’s defining players.
On one side is Florida’s silky guard Walter Clayton Jr., who’s an embodiment of the transfer portal era. He committed to the Gators after an Easter Sunday dinner in 2023 with Golden at Sergio’s, an Italian restaurant in Westchester County known for its crab legs and vodka penne, to which Clayton had unexpectedly invited St. John’s assistant Steve Masiello — also in the process of recruiting the now-senior to follow Rick Pitino after playing his first two seasons for him at Iona — to join.
On the other is Houston’s low-post force J’Wan Roberts, who is in his sixth year with the program after committing to the Cougars before the transfer portal even launched. He has played for Sampson long enough that he shared the court with Quentin Grimes, now in his third NBA season.
And both stars have thrived in their respective programs as a result of the fundamentals their head coaches emphasize.
The toughest part of stopping Florida starts with attempting to slow Clayton down. The 2022-23 MAAC Player of the Year has been the best overall player in this NCAA tournament. He scored 34 points against Auburn in Saturday’s Final Four, including a flurry of hesitation drives to the basket that the Tigers staff admitted were guarded about as well as they could be — Clayton simply executed high degree-of-difficult finishes.
His step-back 3 against Texas Tech in the Elite Eight looms as the most daring and important shot of Florida’s run in this tournament, tying the game up in the final two minutes after the Gators erased a 10-point deficit.
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Walter Clayton Jr.’s late 3s propel Florida to the Final Four
Florida’s Walter Clayton Jr. hits a pair of clutch 3-pointers late to send the Gators to the Final Four.
Clayton has blossomed as Florida’s full-time point guard after shifting over off-guard to start this season, earning the program’s first-ever first-team All-America honors. On a team that Golden has built with quality depth, high-end shooting and a deep and rugged frontcourt, Clayton has emerged as a fearless maestro.
He looks back at that awkward dinner with Golden and Masiello, and laughs: “They thought they were going to have a recruiting battle in the middle of the restaurant.”
Instead, he returned to his home state drama-free, leading the Gators to their first national title game since 2007. Florida pitched a Jalen Brunson-type presence for the program. Clayton likes the comp even though Brunson isn’t his favorite player on NBA 2K because “they got him too small,” making him susceptible to bigger defenses.
Clayton also said he has developed thanks to learning from Golden’s analytics-forward approach.
“It just kind of gives like a different viewpoint of the game — of what’s a good shot, what’s a bad shot, what percentage of the shots are we getting back,” he said. “It kind of gave me a different viewpoint coming here.”
Florida’s roster is a blend of portal, high school and international recruiting. Houston’s isn’t much different — the Cougars do have key portal additions in L.J. Cryer and Milos Uzan. But Sampson is defiant that the guts of the program remain old-school.
The growth of players like Roberts, from a skinny rebounder to hounding Cooper Flagg into missing the critical shot in the Final Four, remains Sampson’s preferred method of team-building.
Roberts hit the two critical free throws that ultimately secured the comeback win over Duke on Saturday, willing home both ends of a one-and-one. With 19 seconds on the clock, Houston assistants watched with arms linked on the bench. After the first shot rattled home, Quannas White moved toward the court to make a coaching point, quickly pulled back to the arm lock as Roberts line-drove in the second free throw.
Roberts had shot 150 free throws a day since the summer to prepare for the moment. He summed up the prevailing vibe of what drives the Houston program this way: “I feel like you never want to let him down,” he said of Sampson, adding the fear of what practice is like after a loss proves a significant motivator.
Sampson has certainly evolved to thrive in this era, but he hasn’t changed aspects fundamental to building his program.
“Well, everybody sits around and ponders [which players are] coming back,” he said. “We always know who is coming back. So we don’t really relate to people that don’t know. And so when we bring in new guys — we have three really good freshmen coming in — they’re going to have to learn how to be Cougar basketball players.
“Our players aren’t going to ask them their opinion on many things. This is the way we do it here.”
The hirings of Sampson and Golden are reflective of their different paths to the cusp of the title, and the eras they come from.
Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin traveled to Indianapolis in March of 2022 to meet Golden, then the coach at San Francisco, before the Dons’ first-round game against Murray State in that year’s NCAA tournament. The sides met in person for the first time at the Le Meridien hotel in Indianapolis, directly next to St. Elmo’s, in a meeting room named after counterculture actor Steve McQueen. It was a fitting setting, as Stricklin sought a different type of thinker for the sport’s changing landscape.
In identifying Golden, who had yet to win an NCAA tournament game, Stricklin foresaw the end of the era of teams simply stockpiling talent. “Understanding how the pieces all fit together and having an analytical [view], I think that helps you in this day and age,” Stricklin said.
What separated Golden was both understanding analytics and having a detailed plan on how to use them in the modern game. Stricklin wanted to be where the puck was headed. “So I thought at the time we hired Todd, this was where everything was going,” he said. “So we tried to get there, and I had a lot of people questioning why we didn’t go hire a quote ‘established coach.'”
Back in 2014, then-Houston athletic director Mack Rhoades faced a much different set of hiring circumstances when he brought in Sampson. Fresh off a five-year show-cause penalty stemming from NCAA violations at Indiana, Sampson worked nearby as an assistant for the Houston Rockets.
Houston had just finished its first year in the American Athletic Conference, and hadn’t been in the NCAA tournament all four seasons of James Dickey’s tenure.
“We both needed each other,” Rhoades said of Sampson by phone on Sunday. “We needed someone that could resurrect the program. And he needed a second chance.”
Rhoades recalled Sampson’s intentionality in the interview, a clear vision of non-negotiables. They’ll play harder than the opponent. Players will go to class. They’ll be coached hard. Family will be at the forefront. Rhoades chuckled when recalling that Sampson said parents could call about anything like academics or character, just not playing time.
Sampson wanted a chance to refurbish his reputation. Rhoades recalled Sampson telling him: “You know what comes up when you Google my name right now?”
Rhoades added: “He wanted to change that legacy for his family.”
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How Kelvin Sampson has made Houston basketball a true family business
As Kelvin Sampson prepares Houston for the Final Four, he and his family reflect on their journey through college basketball.
Upon being hired at Houston, Sampson’s former athletic director at Oklahoma, Joe Castiglione, sent him an unconventional congratulatory gift: a ladder for his office. The ladder was an appreciation of prior championships and a symbol there were more to come.
The ladder has been used plenty, as Houston has reached two Final Fours under Sampson and has the country’s longest active streak of Sweet 16 appearances with six straight.
On Monday, the program built on old-school grit will clash with a team built on designs of staying ahead in a new era. But the gritty team will still use analytics, and the analytics-driven team will still hang tough.
They will play to cut down the nets for either the oldest coach in the history of the sport to win the title, or for one of the youngest trying to establish himself as a face of the next generation.
Styles make fights, and Monday offers a compelling contrast.
