The 2025 men’s national championship game is set with the Houston Cougars taking on the Florida Gators on Monday night in San Antonio.
Just after Florida knocked off the tournament’s top-seeded team — Auburn — on Saturday evening, Houston pulled off a stunning win of its own by completing one of the biggest comebacks in Final Four history to defeat Duke, 70-67, to punch its ticket to the championship game.
Here are some takeaways from Houston’s stunning win.
Houston didn’t roll over
With just over eight minutes to play, Houston faced a 14-point deficit.
With two minutes to play, the Cougars were down by seven.
They had not actually led in the game since it was 6-5 early in the first half.
Even on a stage like the national semifinal, even in the Final Four, even with a team as good as Houston, it would have been easy to write them off at any of those points in the second half. It seemed over. For all intents and purposes, it was over.
Until it wasn’t.
The Cougars went on a stunning 11-1 run over the final 1:10 of regulation to advance to the national championship game.
That was after Duke had a 92.7% win probability.