Inside Florida’s Late-Game Gamble and How It Backfired to End Repeat Title Hopes

TAMPA — Last April, Florida won its third men’s basketball national championship in a final play that will be remembered forever. It’s perhaps the most famous non-shot in NCAA men’s tournament history: Houston’s Emanuel Sharp passing up a three at the last moment and watching the ball trickle away from him helplessly as the Gators’ bench stormed the floor jubilantly.

Perhaps it’s fitting that the Gators’ race to repeat as champs ended on another non-shot.

Down one point with 4.5 seconds to go and its tourney hopes on the thinnest of ice, Florida largely got what it wanted. Xaivian Lee, its top scorer in the backcourt, caught the ball with a head of steam, blitzed up the floor and got all the way to the rim with enough time to get up a potential game-winner.

At the last second, he saw a rotating Alvaro Folgueiras and had other ideas, trying a last-gasp dump-off to a cutting Thomas Haugh. The pass was ill-advised and ill-timed. Even if Haugh had caught the low pass cleanly, he likely wouldn’t have had the chance to lay it in before the buzzer.

Just like that, it was over, the same way Florida had won 349 days before: with the ball bouncing harmlessly on the hardwood.

Lee, the transfer from Princeton brought in to help replicate the Gators’ dynamite 2025 backcourt, will bear an unfair brunt of the blame for not simply taking the shot. Florida head coach Todd Golden said postgame that Lee’s defender wasn’t in legal guarding position, and he believed if Lee had jumped into him and tried to score, Lee would have at least drawn a foul and had free throws for the win. In reality, all that would’ve done was save the Gators from a series of miscues that had put them in that position.

Florida clearly didn’t have its best Sunday. That was clear very early, when No. 9-seeded Iowa got out to a 10-point lead while the Gators missed layups and blew defensive coverages. That’s also why repeating as national champions is so hard. Even building the elite team again like Florida did sets you up to play a series of 50-50 games, often not at your best, that you have to grind out. UConn’s 2023 and ’24 back-to-back bash was the outlier. No other national champion since ’15 Duke has made it out of the first weekend the following year. You need some lucky breaks to win a title, breaks the basketball gods often make you pay back in time.

That feels especially true in the case of the 2025 Gators, who had lived on the edge like few other champions. It took a nail-biter against UConn just to get out of the opening weekend, a miracle comeback late against Texas Tech to get to the Final Four and a 12-point second-half comeback in the title game against Houston before the Sharp three-pointer that wasn’t.

When those bounces go your way, you look like a genius, and Golden certainly seemed like one last March and April. When they don’t, you’re left wide open for criticism, and Golden will feel that too this time around, particularly with how the Gators played their final defensive possession.

Up by two with 8.9 seconds to go, Florida’s aim was to send Iowa to the free throw line. Unconventional as it sounds, there’s some logic behind it. The Gators believed Iowa was likely to play for the three and the win. Florida viewed itself as the better team with the upper hand in a potential overtime, and it would only get to OT if Iowa could make two free throws and Florida couldn’t score on the ensuing possession.

In Florida’s defense, the Gators are no stranger to unorthodox fouling strategy. They turned the Texas Tech Elite Eight game last year on its head by sending the Red Raiders to the line far earlier than usual to try to inject some variance into the game. But giving Iowa freebies for a shot at OT? That would’ve been nearly unprecedented in a game of this magnitude.

The coaching point in the huddle was to face-guard Iowa’s best player (and best free throw shooter) Bennett Stirtz and force someone else to catch it. Boogie Fland, who guarded Stirtz, says they wanted him to be aggressive, potentially even go for a steal. Ideally, the ball would never get to Stirtz and the Gators would give the foul on that other player, daring the Hawkeyes’ supporting cast to make two in the clutch.

But as soon as Iowa began the play, Florida’s defense crumbled. Fland, who needed to prevent a Stirtz catch, got a step behind Stirtz and was further delayed by a Tate Sage screen near the foul line. Lee, who was guarding Sage, froze instead of jumping out on Stirtz. Fland gambled at the last second to try to knock the ball away, but Stirtz was off to the races with numbers on his size. Folgueiras’s man was Alex Condon, who had to step up to prevent an easy run to the rim for Stirtz, but the point guard smartly dished to an open Folgueiras standing alone in the corner, ready for the shot of his life.

ARE. YOU. JOKING.

IOWA LEADS. THIS IS MARCH. #MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/sNDHTqaGj1
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) March 23, 2026

“The only outcome we didn’t want was to have the opportunity to get walked off on,” Florida assistant and analytics guru Jonathan Safir says. “Whether Folgueiras made the shot or not, if you just pause the game when he releases the ball, our process had failed because we were trying to foul and avoid that situation. The result is the result, it’s out of our control at that point.”

Unpause the frame, and you’ll see Folgueiras confidently drill the corner three, sending the Gators fans who had taken over Tampa into shock and Florida on the brink of going home.

So what could’ve gone differently? Golden said the defenders dealing with the screeners “didn’t do a good enough job containing [Stirtz],” helping Fland recover or switch. Essentially, things had already collapsed by the time Stirtz caught the ball.

“We just didn’t make a good enough play off the ball there to stop him from getting down the court, and then we had to make a split-second decision,” Golden said. “We just didn’t make the right one.”

Fland summed it up more simply.

“They were just faster.”

Was this a case of right strategy with poor execution? Or a gamble that resulted in a season crashing to a halt? Golden said he was still confident in the decision that was made and was simply frustrated with the execution. Had Florida gotten to the point of giving the foul, it may well have looked genius in retrospect. But was it too complicated a plan, one that made Fland think he should gamble for the steal that opened up the path for Stirtz? That is what will get Monday morning quarterbacked the most. Any time you end with that big of a coverage bust, you’re bound to face the music.

And while that was the most visible, it was hardly the only late-game move that ended disastrously for Florida. How about with just over five minutes to play, when Golden put back in struggling a Rueben Chinyelu in hopes of getting Condon a quick breather before the final media timeout? Chinyelu checked in with Florida up four, he subbed out trailing one fewer than 90 seconds later. And while Folgueiras’s three was the most consequential, it wasn’t the only costly lapse with Florida pressuring full court. After Florida took its first lead of the second half with 7:04, a coverage bust in the full-court press gave Cooper Koch an open look in the same corner where Folgueiras eventually slayed the Gators for good.

All these moments are the tightrope you walk in this tournament, the ones that separate you from the confetti being blue and orange at the end of the road and a tear-filled walk from the locker room to dais realizing it’s all over. Haugh and Condon, the stars who returned from 2025 to chase another title, walked together with Golden wrapping his arms around them as they experienced their final moments together as Gators. Roommates since the day they arrived as unheralded recruits in Gainesville, Fla., three years ago, Haugh is almost assuredly headed to the NBA next season. The Gators have better odds of keeping Condon, but he’s on draft boards, too. Just 4.4 seconds, the time from the inbound to Stirtz until Folgueiras’s shot tickled the twine, is all it takes to close a remarkable chapter in Florida basketball history.

Haugh could barely stomach thinking about what’s next. Shock seemed to still wash over him as he sat there, bright lights in his face, Gator career likely over. Last year, he and his teammates had pushed every right button when it mattered, made every big shot, gotten every key stop. Sunday was different, a comedy of minor miscues that add up to a jarring conclusion.

“Tough one for us to swallow,” Golden said. “We’ll be thinking about this one for a while.”

More March Madness From Sports Illustrated

Listen to SI’s college sports podcast, Others Receiving Votes, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s YouTube channel.