SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Walter Clayton Jr. is having an NCAA Tournament for the ages. Florida now just needs him to deliver one more time.
Set to face Houston in the title game Monday night at the Alamodome, the Gators finally are getting a shot at another national championship after another special performance from their All-America guard.
Clayton scored 34 points with five 3-pointers, giving him the first consecutive 30-point games this deep in the tourney since Larry Bird, and Florida beat Southeastern Conference rival Auburn 79-73 in the Final Four on Saturday night. The Gators are going to the national championship game for the first time since their titles in 2006 and 2007.
“Clayton was the difference. He was just flat out the difference,” Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said. “We couldn’t contain him down that end.”
No team has against the leading scorer in this NCAA Tournament. He is the first player with 30-point games both the the Elite Eight and semifinals since Bird for Indiana State in 1979, according to ESPN Stats.
“He’s poised, calm and collected, confident in himself. We have that confidence in him,” Gators guard Will Richard said. “We see him practice, see his work ethic. We’re glad everybody else is getting to see him do it in a game.”
The Gators (35-4) got this far only after Clayton rallied them twice in this tournament. He scored 13 of his 23 points in the final eight minutes in a 77-75 win in the second round that ended UConn’s pursuit of a third national title in a row, then had two late 3s last Sunday when they came from nine points down with less than three minutes left to beat Texas Tech.
HOUSTON 70, DUKE 67
In San Antonio, Houston’s suffocating defense wiped away a 14-point deficit over the final eight minutes and erased Cooper Flagg and Duke’s title hopes Saturday night in a 70-67 stunner over the Blue Devils at the Final Four.
Duke made a grand total of one field goal over the last 10 1/2 minutes of this game. The second-to-last attempt during its game-ending 1-for-9 stretch was a step-back jumper in the lane by Flagg that J’Wan Roberts disrupted. The last was a desperation heave by Tyrese Proctor that caught nothing at the buzzer.
It was Roberts’ two free throws with 19.6 seconds left that gave the Cougars their first lead since 6-5. LJ Cryer, who led Houston with 26 points, made two more to push the lead to three. It was Houston’s biggest lead of the night.
“No one ever loses at anything as long as you don’t quit,” coach Kelvin Sampson said. “If you quit, you’ve lost.”
The Cougars (35-4), who have never won a title, not even in the days of Phi Slama Jamma, will play Florida on Monday night for the championship.
Florida’s 79-73 win over Auburn in the early game was a free-flowing hoopsfest. This one would’ve looked perfect on a cracked blacktop and a court with chain-link nets.
That’s just how Houston likes it. It closed the game on a 9-0 run over the final 74 seconds, and though Flagg finished with 27 points, he did it on 8-for-19 shooting and never got a good look after his 3 at the 3:02 mark put the Blue Devils (35-4) up by nine.
It looked over at that point. Houston was just getting started.
“We had a feeling that we could still win this game,” Roberts said.
A team that prides itself on getting three stops in a row — calling the third one the “kill stop” — allowed a measly three free throws down the stretch. One came when Joseph Tugler got a technical for batting the ball from a Duke player’s hand as he was trying to throw an inbounds pass.
