By Rohan Nadkarni, Andrew Greif and Greg Rosenstein
We’re now down to two. After major comeback victories on Saturday, the Houston Cougars and Florida Gators will face off Monday night in San Antonio for the national championship. Will longtime Houston coach Kelvin Sampson finally take home the trophy or will rising star Todd Golden prevent that?
It all goes down at 8:50 p.m. ET Monday on CBS. Stay with NBC News all night for the latest from the Alamodome.
With a win tonight Houston’s 69-year-old Kelvin Sampson 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 Sunday. “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, 14 will have been top seeds.
Houston and Florida are playing for the first time against one another in an NCAA Tournament, and this is only the third meeting all-time. The last came in 1973. That was more than a decade before Florida coach Todd Golden, 39, was even born.
Andrew Greif
