NCAA Championship tips off in San Antonio

Houston and Florida have tipped off in tonight’s championship game. Houston had the ball first but their first shot rimmed out.

Without a doubt it was Houston’s, for two reasons. Though Houston’s defense was ranked as the best in the country this season in field-goal percentage allowed and total points allowed, Duke’s historically efficient offense presented its most difficult challenge.

Not only did the Blue Devils bog down offensively in the second half, they went more than seven minutes without a field goal, an absurd drought given Duke’s talent. Perhaps the even harder challenge for Houston, however, was finding enough offense to complete the comeback.

Scoring has never come easily for Kelvin Sampson’s teams in recent seasons, and though this year’s team is much more dangerous, it still doesn’t often produce points in bunches. Emanuel Sharp won’t have to pay for a meal the rest of his life around Houston’s campus with the way he shot the ball in the final minutes.

Houston’s defense led the nation this season by averaging 58 points allowed; only four teams were able to score more than 70 points. That’s an important threshold, however, because the Cougars are 33-0 when they allow 69 points or fewer but 2-4 when they allow 70-plus.

Why does that number matter? Largely it’s a function of Houston’s offense not matching up well in a shootout. The Cougars actually have shot the ball well, making 39.9% of their 3-pointers, but on average they’re scoring about 12 fewer points per game than Florida. The Gators will want to run to score quickly, while Houston prefers to play methodically.

With a win tonight, Houston’s Kelvin Sampson, 69, would become the oldest coach to win an NCAA men’s basketball championship. Jim Calhoun was 68 when Connecticut won in 2011.

“When you’re pushing 70, you look at things a lot differently,” Sampson told reporters yesterday. “Last night I got so many texts, I haven’t returned any, there are too many … but I saw Tubby [Smith] and Rick Barnes and Tom Izzo and [Gregg Popovich] and a bunch of the older coaches, and they all kind of had a similar message to me. You know, ‘Win one for the old guys’ or something like that.”

No matter the result tonight, the matchup of two No. 1 seeds guarantees that for the 26th time since the NCAA Tournament expanded in 1985, the national champ will be a No. 1 seed. Of the last 18 champions, including tonight’s, 14 will have been top seeds.

Houston and Florida are playing each other for the first time in an NCAA Tournament, and this is only the third meeting all time. The last was in 1973. That was more than a decade before Florida coach Todd Golden, 39, was even born.