There’s nothing in sports quite like Saturday at the Final Four.
Fans of 4 fan bases descending on the same city, decked out in their school’s colors and well-hydrated. As they make their way from the host city’s hotels and watering holes and file into the building for basketball, almost every fan involved believes their team will win the national championship. Hope is the Final Four’s abundant currency, even in years where there’s a Cinderella, but especially so in years like this one, when 4 powerhouses are on a semifinal Saturday collision course.
What’s more, while there’s pain in defeat at the Final Four and losses still linger, there’s “honor” in it too, to borrow a phrase from Danny Hurley, who knows a thing or two about Final Fours, even if he doesn’t know much about losing in them as a head coach. Rarely does a team that loses in the Final Four get blasted by fans or the media. Sure, there’s always a dose of Monday — or, if you are lucky, Tuesday — morning quarterbacking, but for the most part a Final Four loss is eventually met with appreciation. Fans celebrate the season that was instead of constantly lamenting what might have been. There aren’t many sporting events where when you lose, you still get a piece of the court and a banner to hang, but that’s exactly what happens at the Final Four. Even the blue-bloods hang banners from Final Fours that end in defeat.
Of course, everyone wants to win.
Duke, playing in its 18th Final Four, wants to put a stamp on one of the best regular seasons in the sport’s history. Cooper Flagg, Duke’s freshman star, can put a punctuation mark on the best 1-and-done campaign since Syracuse’s Carmelo Anthony cut down the nets in 2003.
Auburn is playing in only its second Final Four, but it is the Tigers’ second in 6 years thanks to Bruce Pearl’s basketball revolution. For the season’s first 4 full months, Auburn was the best team in the country. A late-season swoon after clinching the SEC changed perceptions somewhat, but if Auburn wins the national championship on Monday night, the 3 late-season losses will simply be a dramatic inflection point in the eventual SEC Storied made about this incredible team.
Houston is playing in its eighth Final Four, which is an exceptional story considering that when Kelvin Sampson arrived at the program in 2014, Houston had made just 1 NCAA Tournament appearance since 1992. Will the 8th trip to the Final Four finally bring a historic Houston program that coveted national title?
Florida is back in the Final Four for the first time since 2014. The Gators’ 6 Final Fours are the second-most in the SEC, behind only blue-blood Kentucky. A third national title would put the Gators in even more rarefied air, making Florida 1 of just 9 programs to win 3 or more national titles.
The 4 No. 1 seeds at the Final Four? This is only the second time that’s happened (2008). The other time? That also happened in San Antonio.
These are all compelling storylines. But beneath the obvious, there’s always a few that aren’t highlighted quite as loudly. Here are 5 subplots you might not know about this season’s Final Four, all of which make this incredible clash of 4 No. 1 seeds all the more fascinating.
5. Kelvin Sampson needed Houston as much as it needed him
When Kelvin Sampson took the Houston job, his career was on the ropes. Fired from Indiana for cheating in 2008, Sampson journeyed through assistant jobs in the NBA before taking the only college gig he could get after the expiration of a draconian 5-year show cause penalty issued by the NCAA. Houston’s lone NCAA Tournament appearance in 20 years prior to Sampson’s arrival came in 2010, when Tom Penders and the Cougars won the Conference USA tournament as a 7-seed to earn an automatic bid. Penders resigned after Maryland blasted Houston in the first round, and the Cougars settled for 3 more years of anonymity and mediocrity under James Dickey before taking a chance on Sampson, whose brand was toxic enough for them to sign cheap. In other words, Sampson needed Houston as much as Houston needed him. Now Sampson can get the national title his résumé lacks and Houston, one of the sport’s best programs in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, can finally claim the national title that eluded the program in the Guy Lewis and Phi Slama Jama era.
4. Auburn is especially familiar with the other 3 programs at the Final Four
Auburn is just the second team in the history of the NCAA Tournament to play all 3 of the other teams at the Final Four in the regular season. Florida was the first, pulling off the feat in 2014 when the Gators went 3-2 against Kentucky, Wisconsin, and UConn before joining all of them in Arlington, Texas, for the 2014 Final Four. Auburn was 1-2 in games against Duke, Florida, and Houston, but in at least 2 of those games, Auburn dealt with road-game atmospheres. Auburn beat Houston at the Toyota Center in Houston in front of a partisan, pro-Cougars crowd in November and lost a nail-biter at Cameron Indoor Stadium in December. In fact, the only game that Auburn lost decisively of the 3 was at home to Florida, who led the Tigers by as many as 21 points in the second half of a 90-81 win in The Jungle. The bracket sets up so that if Duke defeats Houston on Saturday, Auburn could play 2 “revenge” games on its way to the program’s first national championship.
3. The two youngest coaches in the NCAA Tournament are in the Final Four
Jon Scheyer has advanced Duke to the Final Four at the ripe old age of 37, the first Duke coach other than Mike Krzyzewski to take the Blue Devils to the sport’s grandest stage in 47 years. Or, put differently, the first Duke coach to go to the Final Four other than Krzyzewski since 10 years before Scheyer was born.
“I’ve always wanted to make him proud,” Scheyer said of the opportunity after defeating Alabama in the Elite Eight. “Part of his legacy isn’t just the wins. I want his legacy to be how our program continues to be right there as a top program, and that’s something Coach K and I have talked a lot about. So obviously there’s a responsibility you feel and a pride.”
Todd Golden, a former walk-on at Saint Mary’s, has Florida in the Final Four for the first time since future Hall-of-Fame coach Billy Donovan’s 2014 team accomplished the feat. When Golden took the Florida job in 2022, one of the first people he spoke to was Donovan, who Golden has said helped him get the lay of the land in Gainesville. Like Scheyer, Golden has immense respect for the legacy Donovan built at Florida, and he told Jon Rothstein he’d reach out about the Final Four experience this week.
Todd Golden tells me that he hopes to catch up with Billy Donovan this week to pick his brain on how to handle Final Four week.Donovan went to four Final Fours at Florida and won back-to-back national titles in 2006 and 2007.
— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) March 31, 2025For his part, Donovan, currently the head coach of the Chicago Buills, has enjoyed Florida’s run from afar.
“I’m just really, really happy for them,” Donovan said last week. “There are so many people in the atheltic department at Florida, in the basketball building, that I care about and respect. To see them get a No. 1 seed and to see them be in a position to really maybe have a great run in the tournament, I am very excited.”
2. Three transfers return to the Final Four with new teams
In perhaps the greatest “sign of the times” at this year’s Final Four, there will be 3 players making return trips to the Final Four, albeit on new teams.
Florida’s Alijah Martin earned a chance to make history last weekend when Florida rallied past Texas Tech, as he will almost certainly become first player in NCAA Tournament history to start for 2 Final Four teams as long as he starts the semifinal against Auburn on Saturday. Martin was previously a starter for Florida Atlantic’s Cinderella run to the Final Four in 2023, earning all-regional honors and scoring 26 points while grabbing 7 rebounds in a 1-point, instant classic Final Four loss to San Diego State. In the age of the transfer portal, Martin is unlikely to be alone on this list for long, but he’ll always be first.
Martin is joined by 2 other transfers with Final Four experience. LJ Cryer went to the Final Four with Baylor in 2021, though he played only 3 Final Four minutes in Baylor’s national championship run. Duke’s Mason Gillis, a key Blue Devils reserve, is also back in the Final Four. Gillis played valuable minutes, scoring 8 points off the bench, in Purdue’s win over NC State a season ago. He also played 5 minutes in the Boilermakers’ national title loss to UConn.
More transfer stories like this are coming, but this year’s Final Four is the beginning of the new era.
1. The biggest league game in SEC Basketball history?
It turns out that Auburn and Alabama’s reign in playing the biggest conference game in the history of SEC basketball was short-lived. Then top-ranked Auburn met the moment when it outlasted then No. 2 Alabama 94-85 in Tuscaloosa in February.
The Tigers would love to win the next “biggest SEC game ever,” on the sport’s grandest stage.
Florida and Auburn will be the 9th conference game in the Final Four, but just the first between 1 seeds since 1985, when Georgetown and a dominant Patrick Ewing bested Chris Mullin and St. John’s. The Gators and Tigers meeting in the Final Four doesn’t have Iron Bowl appeal or the allure of the North Carolina-Duke semifinal in 2022, but it’s the first all-SEC semifinal in Final Four history, making it easily the biggest SEC basketball game ever played.
5 Final Four stories worth knowing Saturday Down South.
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