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00:00Extraordinary coverage from Mike DiCorsi in San Antonio.
00:04Great columns.
00:06Great on our show last week going into the weekend for the Final Four and the Alamo Dome.
00:14And then he was there, obviously, last night for that crazy game, that crazy finish.
00:19And you wrote about that last play.
00:21From the minute it started to how, bottom line is, the guy that was the MOP, the scorer,
00:29the guy that does all the buckets, was actually the guy that played the best defense
00:35and made the play to ruin it for Houston and Kelvin Sampson.
00:40Yeah, I found it really interesting that he was able to do that.
00:45And I will tell you that it all happened so fast that a lot of us at Courtside were like,
00:49who was that that flashed?
00:51Who was that masked man who flashed out and challenged the shot from Emmanuel Sharp
00:56and forced him to basically abandon the shot and it ended up failing?
01:01I think in the moment, if Emmanuel had it to reconsider, he would have gone ahead with the shot.
01:07It would have been better off to have been blocked.
01:10It may have come back to him, may have gone out of bounds,
01:13deciding to let go of the ball and let it fall to the floor.
01:17And therefore, it would have been a violation if he had picked it up.
01:20That was the worst possible decision in that moment.
01:25But what Kelvin Sampson was disappointed in was that if Emmanuel Sharp had pump faked there,
01:32there's no way that Clayton could have stayed in the play.
01:37It would have been an open shot for Sharp.
01:40And that was his disappointment there.
01:42But that's the nature of those last minutes.
01:44And it's also the nature of having the great players, Scott.
01:50When we went into the Final Four, we said the pros were at Duke, obviously,
01:55and then secondarily at Florida.
01:58And you saw the difference.
02:00After the game, about 45 minutes to an hour after the game,
02:03Kelvin Sampson stood with a lot of reporters surrounding him
02:06and talked about how his team was built to win this tournament.
02:09How hard it is, but his team was built for it because how together they were
02:13and how mature they were and how tough they were.
02:17And he was right about all that.
02:18But they weren't built to win it because they weren't talented enough.
02:23You just have to have better players.
02:26You can't win it with good college players.
02:29You win it with pros who are good college players.
02:33And I don't mean pros because everybody's getting paid now.
02:35I mean guys that are going to the NBA.
02:37They're going to be first-round picks.
02:39It's what won it for four decades now.
02:42And Houston did not have those guys.
02:46And Florida had two of them at least.
02:49Yes.
02:50Yes.
02:51Walter Clayton, fantastic player.
02:53The NBA scouts are starting to catch on to.
02:56And I think Thomas Houck, he showed last night.
02:59I mean he's a first-round guy.
03:01That finish he had, 12 minutes left, 12 and change.
03:04He gets fouled on the break and invents a twisting layup that would have been flattering to Julius Serving.
03:13Now, I'm not saying he's Julius Serving.
03:15But that play, Julius would have been proud to hang that one on the wall.
03:20It was like a backwards finger roll.
03:23Yeah, kind of.
03:24Yeah, exactly.
03:25I talked to him afterward.
03:26He had no idea what he'd done.
03:29He just was trying to get up there.
03:30But that's what the great players do.
03:32That's what the really gifted players do.
03:34They make plays that others can't conceive.
03:37And Thomas was a huge hero in the Texas Tech game.
03:40They're nowhere near last night's game if it weren't for his three-pointers at the end of Texas Tech.
03:46Those two guys were the reason that they won it.
03:48And that's how it almost always works.
03:51Scott, it's just you have to have those guys.
03:53And interestingly, a year from now, Houston will have those players.
03:58They've got two McDonald's All-Americans coming in.
04:00And one of them is a top-ten prospect.
04:03They'll have that talent.
04:04And they will lose J.J. Roberts.
04:06And they'll lose L.J. Cryer.
04:08But they will have back Francis.
04:11They will have back Sharp.
04:13It's still a really strong team.
04:14And now they're talented enough.
04:16A lot of people afterward, after last night's game, were saying, well, this was his shot.
04:22No, it wasn't.
04:23Next year's the shot.
04:24Next year's when he's got the guys.
04:26We'll see if they come together in the same way that this team did.
04:31But they may not need to come to get quite as together as this team was because every now and then they'll have guys who can talent their way past it.
04:40Right.
04:40What about the Boozer twins going to Duke?
04:43Like, they're going to be better, too.
04:45They might be better than they were with this team.
04:48They might.
04:49It's going to be harder, though, because Boozer is a terrific player.
04:55But Cooper Flagg was generational.
04:58And when one says generational, we don't really mean generational.
05:01We mean, like, maybe once a decade.
05:03And that's what Cooper is.
05:05I think that Boozer is fantastic and he's going to be an excellent player.
05:11And they may be a better team.
05:13It depends on what they do at point guard.
05:15They weren't strong at point guard this year.
05:18They were passable.
05:20And Seon James did a lot of good things.
05:23But you saw at the end the weakness there, why it mattered.
05:27He couldn't get the ball inbounds.
05:28He couldn't generate offense.
05:30They had to once again go Cooper Flagg too often one-on-one with Jawan Roberts.
05:35So we saw the weakness there.
05:38They've got to get better at that spot if they want to win this thing next year.
05:43I thought James had some sloppy moments in that game on Saturday that he looked lost.
05:48But let me ask you about, because, you know, during the game, I don't know if you caught it or not,
05:52but I was, like, responding to you as you were tweeting about the refs.
05:58And I was like, you know, I don't know if you saw my tweet that my dog could ref this game better.
06:02Now, I don't want to insult anyone by name, but I don't understand.
06:08Like, what was your thoughts on the four fouls in the first half?
06:12That's impossible.
06:14And then in the second half, they called 25 fouls.
06:17Like, I was like, what is happening here?
06:20That was very poor.
06:21It was a very poorly officiated championship game.
06:24And one of the wonders of last night's game was that it superseded, that it rose above the terrible officiating in that game.
06:33Four fouls in the first half was a joke.
06:35Look, it's not like it was in 2000 when you were allowed to do whatever, and Cincinnati took advantage of that,
06:43Michigan State took advantage of that.
06:44And I'm not condemning them because they played to the way the game was officiated 25 years ago, which can't do those things now.
06:52And Houston plays a very rugged style of basketball, but not like that because they know they can't.
06:59But they don't ever play 20 minutes without fouling more than three times.
07:04It's just they can't.
07:06They're much too physical.
07:07I saw one illegal screen that looked like the guy's head was going to come off, and they didn't call it.
07:16And I knew right then where we were headed for that period.
07:19And honestly, in some ways, it was almost hypocritical to do that and then come back in the second half and call everything,
07:30including several fouls that weren't committed.
07:32And I thought that in particular, I thought official Doug Sermons had a terrible second half.
07:40And one of the calls that I thought were really poor, when Todd Golden lost it on it and probably went out of the coach's box or whatever,
07:50Sermons was right in front of me 45, 50 feet away and called a tech on him.
07:55And I did not think that that was a strong performance by him.
07:59The officials at the Final Four have to do better because the players and the teams are giving everything.
08:06How about the officials giving everything as well?
08:09How about they brag about before the game, they brag about how many big games they've reffed,
08:14and then they go out and butcher that game.
08:17Like, I was like, I don't care how many times you've been in it.
08:19If you suck, you suck.
08:21It's that simple.
08:22I couldn't believe the tax that they were throwing, and I couldn't believe the second half.
08:28It was like I was watching an NBA game where they – I mean, they'll blow the whistle seven million times in a regular season game.
08:35And I'm like, this is so boring.
08:37I'm going to – I'm going to bed.
08:39That's what I'm going to do.
08:39I'm going to go to bed.
08:40But it ended up being, at the end of the day, a fantastic finish, I thought.
08:46Like, here they came back.
08:48They stole the game.
08:49They got it done.
08:50They won their third national championship.
08:52And once again, Houston fails.
08:55And you've done what now?
08:56Did you say 35 of them?
08:59This is my 35th, yes.
09:01And I heard from some people that I respect today saying that they thought the ending was kind of a dullard.
09:09But we've never seen anything like it before.
09:12It was great.
09:12How can you be upset about unique?
09:14How can you be upset about unique?