Florida Navigated the NCAA Tournament's Toughest Path to Win It All
Nothing was easy for the Gators — and they didn't make it easy on themselves.
Going into this past weekend, I asked rhetorically whether the relative dullness of the 2025 NCAA men’s tourney in regional play would be all worth it when the most statistically overpowered Final Four in modern history met in San Antonio. And while your mileage may vary — I still do miss the usual early-round upsets and buzzer-beaters — there’s no doubt we got a trio of really good games at the Alamodome.
Florida and Auburn’s back-and-forth all-SEC semifinal battle set the tone; Houston’s impossible comeback over Duke was one of the most memorable in tourney history. And Monday night’s title game between Florida and Houston was another close, hard-nosed affair that came down to a few more key plays and stops by the Gators. It was a heartbreaker for Kelvin Sampson and the Cougars, who led by 12 at one point early in the second half, but also a testament to Todd Golden’s Florida squad, a deep, talented and — most importantly — tough team that earned this title every step of the way.
In fact, it can be argued that this was the toughest title to win in the modern history of the NCAA men’s tournament.
One of the themes I and others touched on all tourney was the sheer top-heaviness of the men’s field. This was one of the reasons for comparatively few upsets early in the bracket — the best teams were just better, and the cream eventually rose to the top with just the second modern Final Four to feature all four No. 1 seeds.
Of course, that means the eventual champ would have to make it through an absolute gauntlet of opposing talent, and that’s exactly the path Florida had to navigate. The Gators beat teams ranked Nos. 2, 3, 8, 10 and 29 in Sports-Reference’s Simple Rating System (SRS) scores en route to the title, which combined with No. 198 Norfolk State in Round 1 to give Florida an average opposing SRS of +19.5 across their six tourney wins, easily the highest of any champion since the 64-team bracket era began in 1985.
For another way to measure the toughest paths, we can also borrow a page from the book of ESPN’s Strength of Record metric, which calculates how difficult it would be for a typical high-level team to replicate the success of a given team against its schedule. In this case, we can plug the SRS of the average champion from 1985-2024 (+23.8) into a win probability formula against the opponents of each men’s champion since 1985, computing how many wins we’d expect the typical champ to have against their schedule. And by that accounting, Florida’s 2025 run was also easily the most difficult in modern history: we’d only expect the typical champ to win 3.4 times in those games. Instead, Florida won all six.
Any way you slice it, this was not an easy way to win a title. And the Gators didn’t make things easy, either. They trailed deep into almost all of their wins, including Monday night’s title game. As a matter of fact, they had a negative average margin on the scoreboard in four of their six games during the tourney — against UConn in the Round of 32, Texas Tech in the Elite 8, Auburn in the Final Four and their largest average deficit of all (-3.6 points) against Houston in the championship:
Needless to say, Walter Clayton Jr. and his Florida team won all of those games, despite playing them on hard mode. It was just another aspect of the most challenging title path in modern history — and a fitting statement on how much the Gators overcame en route to the championship.
Filed under: College Basketball