Florida rode excellent defense and good shooting to a 73-57 win over the UCLA bruins. Florida’s attack was balanced with four players in double digits along with Adrian Moss’ nine-point contribution off the Gator bench. Florida coach (and maybe the most well-groomed man in the country) Billy Donovan became the second-youngest coach (Bobby Knight, 35) at 40 years of age to win the National Championship.
The Gators controlled the first half, forcing and capitalizing on eight UCLA turnovers en route to a 36-25 halftime lead. UCLA made the mistake of playing Florida’s game, pushing the ball when they should have been walking it up. Corey Brewer had a big first half, scoring seven points but, more importantly, he shut down UCLA’s leading scorer, Arron Afflalo. Joakim Noah broke the title game record of block shots with five in the first half, a prediction that CBS’ Billy Packer made at the beginning of the game. Packer never misses an opportunity to point out when he’s right, but with Noah coming into the game averaging over four blocks per tournament game, Billy is hardly Nostradamus. Jordan Farmar led all scorers with 12 points in the half, carrying UCLA’s offensive load and keeping the Bruins within striking distance.
UCLA needed to get off to a good start in the second half, but Florida drained three early shots from behind the arc to give the Gators an 18-point lead that was too deep a hole for the Bruins to dig out of. UCLA cut the lead to 12 with 5:52 to play, but were never able to close the gap further. Brewer continued to harrass Afflalo, who managed just 10 points on 3-10 shooting. But it was Joakim Noah who won the Final Four MVP, finishing with 16 points, eight rebounds, three assists, two steals and a NCAA Championship record six blocked shots.
All in all, it was a rather anti-climactic Final Four after the previous weekends were maybe the most exciting of any tournament in history. That had a lot to do with Florida, who proved that they were playing ball at the highest level in the country.
