King Kaufman's Sports Daily
With the NCAA title on the line, Florida makes UCLA look bad, and that's good.
Read more: Sports, Florida, Basketball, NCAA, Sports Illustrated, College Basketball, NCAA Tournament, King Kaufman, Sports Daily
April 4, 2006 | You hear coaches and experts say it all the time: The NCAA Tournament comes down to matchups. And if you never quite believed them, UCLA offered a glaring example over the last 48 hours in Indianapolis.
In the NCAA Tournament semifinals against LSU, the Bruins looked like one of the greatest teams of the last quarter century, thoroughly dominating a big, athletic team on the way to an easy rout. But as good as UCLA looked Saturday, it looked that bad and worse Monday in the Championship Game against Florida.
Which looked like one of the greatest teams of the last quarter century.
Florida, the third seed in the Minneapolis Region and your new NCAA men's basketball champion, isn't one of the greatest teams of the last quarter century, the last quarter century including as it does a time when elite, NBA-bound players still spent four years in college as a matter of course. But the Gators are awfully good.
Not many people wrote "Florida" in that center box of their bracket sheets, but by the end Joakim Noah and company were a juggernaut. They simply blew UCLA off the court, as they'd done their other Tournament foes, with one exception. The game was in doubt at "and the rockets red glare," but not much later than that.
The Bruins, who had looked so calm and collected in tearing LSU apart, who had managed to gather themselves and rally against Gonzaga after a disastrous start, looked disorganized and jittery. They rushed, they fouled, they made stupid mistakes.
Only this time, they never got it together.
A couple of sequences in the middle of the first half not only defined the evening but helped give Florida the big lead it would carry most of the rest of the way.
Up 21-15, Florida's Lee Humphrey, who does nothing on offense but shoot threes, came off a screen by Noah on the right wing, took a pass from Walter Hodge and went up for the shot. UCLA's Cedric Bozeman, trailing Humphrey around the pick, leaped at Humphrey and bumped his arm as he shot. Bucket and a foul, Bozeman's second. Humphrey completed the four-point play for 25-15.
Almost two minutes later, the score now 27-17, UCLA's Lorenzo Mata took a pass in the left block and went up for an uncontested layup. But even with Florida's star shot blocker, Noah, on the bench, Mata appeared intimidated by defenders Adrian Moss and Chris Richard. They didn't even jump to stop him, but he went up awkwardly and missed the layup.
Mata got his own rebound and found himself underneath the basket with Moss all over him and Richard closing in for a double-team. With a fresh shot clock, his play was to find a teammate, but he forced up a shot, which Richard blocked.
Moss picked up the loose ball and Mata, compounding his offensive error, reached around Moss and committed a foul -- 86 feet from the UCLA basket. It was the third foul for Mata, a valuable reserve.
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