HOUSTON — Nobody was guarding UConn’s best player. So Adama Sanogo spun the ball to get his fingers just right, set his feet behind the 3-point line and splashed in the shot. Then, less than a minute later, he did it again.
It was as much basketball clinic as highlight video — and all of it perfectly fitting for the Huskies, who are methodically steamrolling through a March Madness bracket that has been a free-for-all everywhere else.
UConn doled out another drama-free beatdown Saturday, getting 21 points and 10 rebounds from Sanogo to dispatch Miami 72-59 and move one win from the school’s fifth national title.
“There’s a lot of teams that want to play Monday,” Sanogo said. “It means a lot to us.”
Jordan Hawkins overcame his stomach bug and scored 13 for the Huskies, who came into this most unexpected Final Four as the only team with any experience on college basketball’s final weekend and with the best seeding of the four teams in Houston — at No. 4.
Against fifth-seeded Miami, they were the best team on the court from beginning to end. Starting with three straight 3s — one jumper from Hawkins and two of those set shots from Sanogo — UConn took a quick 9-0 lead and never trailed.
“This is something that I worked on all summer, especially shooting,” Sanogo said.
On Monday in the title game, the Huskies will face San Diego State, which became the first team to hit a buzzer-beater while trailing in a Final Four game for a 72-71 victory over Florida Atlantic. UConn was an early 7 1/2-point favorite, according to FanDuel Sportsbook.
“They’re one of the best teams in the country,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said of the Aztecs. “And I think it’s fitting that both of us kind of earned our way into this title game.”
But while the early game was an all-timer, the nightcap was simply more of the same from the Huskies (30-8).
The 13-point win was UConn’s closest since the brackets came out. The Huskies are the sixth team since the tournament expanded to 64 teams in 1985 to reach the title game with five straight double-digit victories. It’s an impressive list of behemoths with a knack for closing: Four of the first five went on to win the championship.
Some thought Miami (29-8), with the nation’s fifth-ranked offense and four players who have scored 20 points at least three times this season, might be the team to slow this Huskies juggernaut. Not to be.
Isaiah Wong led the ‘Canes with 15 points on 4-for-10 shooting. Harassed constantly by Sanogo, 7-foot-2 Donovan Clingan and the rest of Connecticut’s long-armed, rangy perimeter players, Miami, which came in with the nation’s fifth-best offense, shot 25% in the first half and 33.3% for the game.
“Obviously what we tried to do not only didn’t work, I couldn’t even recognize it,” Miami coach Jim Larranaga said. “Offensively we were out of sync, but defensively we were too.”
Not that UConn was all boring. The Huskies enjoyed their own sort of buzzer-beater in the form of a 3 from Alex Karaban that sent the Huskies jogging into the locker room with a 13-point lead at halftime.
They built it to 20 before the first TV timeout of the second half. By then, Jim Nantz, calling his last Final Four, could start saving his voice for Monday.
Miami did get it under double digits a few times, but this never got interesting.
Not helping: Hurricanes guard Nijel Pack missed about five minutes after managers had trouble locating a substitute for a busted shoe. Pack finished with eight points, and Jordan Miller, who hit all 20 shots he took from the floor and the line in Miami’s Elite Eight win, went 4 for 10 for 11 points. Only one Miami player made more than half his shots.
“I’m a defensive guy first and foremost,” Hurley said. “I just love the way we guarded them. They’re one of the best offenses in the country, and we really disrupted them.”
Butler’s buzzer-beater sends San Diego State to title game
HOUSTON (AP) — San Diego State’s vaunted defense staggered well into the second half as free-flowing Florida Atlantic breezed to a 14-point lead.
The Aztecs found their teeth again to get back into the game. Then Lamont Butler delivered at the very end.
Butler hit a buzzer-beating jumper for the ages, sending San Diego State to its first national championship game with a 72-71 win over fellow mid-major Florida Atlantic in the Final Four on Saturday night.
“I didn’t really know how big it was,” Butler said after his calm reaction to one of the greatest shots in NCAA Tournament history. “We’re going to the national championship. That’s not things many people do.”
A diabolical defense had pushed San Diego State (32-6) all the way to the final stop for the NCAA tourney.
The Aztecs bumped and harassed opponents all season to create the first all-mid-major national semifinal since VCU and Butler in 2011.
The swaggy Owls (35-4) seemed to have solved San Diego State’s vaunted defense, using constant movement and ball reversals to create mismatches they could exploit.
San Diego State found its defensive mojo midway through the second half, clamping down on the Owls while whittling their lead down to one on Jaedon LeDee’s short jumper with 36 seconds left.
When FAU’s Johnell Davis missed a contested layup, San Diego State coach Brian Dutcher opted to not call timeout, joking that he didn’t have any plays left.
All he had to do was get the ball to Butler.
The clock ticking down, Butler dribbled to the baseline, found that cut off and circled back.
He stepped back to create a little room and hit a jumper that sent the Aztecs racing out onto the floor and had San Diego Padres fans going wild at Petco Park.
Butler’s winning buzzer-beater was the first for the Final Four since Jalen Suggs for Gonzaga against UCLA in 2021 and No. 5 overall. But it’s the only one when the winning team was trailing at the time of the shot.
Next up for the Mountain West’s first Final Four team is a chance to win the conference’s first national title Monday night against UConn, which advanced with a 72-59 win against Miami.
“We’ve always been knocked down,” said San Diego State’s Matt Bradley, who had 21 points after struggling in the previous three games. “But the biggest thing we always do is get back up and keep fighting.”