Defending champion Florida got beat on a last-second shot by Iowa on Sunday, and now they're out of the tournament. Coach Todd Golden tried to downplay what went wrong on the final play, and he's not wrong. They weren't good enough to win all day, and made too many mistakes on an unexpected day.
TAMPA, Fla. — Florida was the defending national champion, and there were plenty of people who were sure they were primed to make another run.
And if they were going to lose, not many people expected it to be on Sunday. Not against an Iowa Hawkeyes team that finished ninth in the Big Ten, plays a slow and boring style of offensive basketball and came into the game as a double-digit underdog in an arena in Tampa that was filled with Gators fans.
But the Hawkeyes did it anyway, pulling off the biggest upset of the mostly-chalk 2026 NCAA Tournament. They won 73-72 at Benchmark International Arena and will move on to the Sweet 16 in Houston.
The Gators, the No. 1 seed in the South regional, are going home far sooner than they expected.
"Yeah, it's a tough one. I'm going to remember this feeling for a while,'' said Florida forward Alex Condon, who led the Gators with 21 points. "I'm just going to use it as motivation. I think it's going to make us better players individually just to know what this feeling is like, working hard all year to get into this position as a 1 seed and just letting it get away from us a little bit.''
Iowa jumped out to an early 10-point lead, and kept it for much of the game, leading by as much as 12 midway through the second half. But Florida, the SEC regular season champions, reeled them back in with a late rally and actually took a four-point lead in the closing minutes.
Florida led 72-70 with 8.9 seconds left, and opted to press. Iowa point guard Bennett Stirtz got free and caught the inbounds pass in full stride, beating his Florida defender up the court. The fast break was on, and Iowa forward Alvaro Folguerias drifted into the right corner.
Stirtz hit him with a pass and he nailed a three-pointer to give Iowa the lead. The Gators muffed a last-second chance to score, and the Hawkeyes had themselves a win to remember.
It's their first Sweet 16 since 1999. Fran McCaffery, who coached at Iowa for 15 years, never did it. Ben McCollum did it in his first year with a bunch of mid-major transfers, including Stirtz and Folguerias.
“This is really special,” Folguerias said. “March is for the dreamers and there’s no better dreamer than us. It’s incredible. We have to keep going. We are one of the 16 best teams in the country. We’re still hungry.”
For Florida, it was a brutal loss. It's safe to say they've been one of the hottest two or three teams in the country lately, going 17-1 since the first or the year before losing to Vanderbilt in the SEC Tournament.
They had no intention of going his early.
"As I told the team, it was a 67-possession game and a lot is going to be made out of the last possession, as it should in a game like this,'' Florida coach Todd Golden said. "But there were a lot of things that we did not do in the other 66 possessions that allowed the game to be in that type of situation where they could hit a three to walk us off.
"That possession is going to be talked about a lot, but I think when we watch the tape, especially in the first half, we didn't finish well enough around the rim and we did not prevent them from finishing well enough around the rim. Even though we were only down two, I felt like they controlled the first half. I thought we did a good job after they got out to that 12-point lead with 14 minutes to go. Obviously we played really well the in the last 14 minutes, but we dug ourselves too big of a hole.''
Stirtz has the ball in his hand more than any player in the country, so Florida's plan was to press to keep the ball out of his hands. It failed miserably. He beat Gators point guard Boogie Fland to the spot and caught the inbounds pass as full speed.
"The idea was to keep the ball out of Bennett's hands, let him throw it to somebody else,'' Golden said. "So we wanted a face guard and throw it to somebody else and then take a foul and put one of their role players in a pressure situation. But they ran a little kind of double stagger, got him loose.
"We just didn't make a good enough play off the ball there to stop him from getting down the court, and then we had to make a split-second decision and we just didn't make the right one. Again, I think we had a good plan in terms of what we were trying to do, but we didn't execute it very well. They still had to step up and make a tough shot in a big moment, and they did that.''
Iowa won despite shooting just 7-for-24 from three-point range, a measly 29 percent. Stirtz, their best player, was 0-for-9 from three. He only had three games all year without a three.
"Again, I think we did a good job guarding the three-point line,'' Golden said. "We did a great job on Stirtz. If their plan was to try to finish over our size at the rim, I would live with that any day of the week. That's been a really bad formula for teams all year. We've been one of the best two-point field goal defenses in America. We just didn't to it tonight.
"So credit them. I thought they were tough and physical and did a good job finishing around the rim and we did not. We did not do a good enough job preventing them from finishing it, but if that's what they saw and they exploited it, then credit to them.''
Florida won their first-round game by 59 points over Prairie View A&M, the second-largest margin of victory in NCAA history. They scored 114 points, but didn't have the same firepower against Iowa. They made only six threes themselves, and feel like they had an opportunity lost.
Thomas Haugh, their best player, made just 3-of-11 shots from the field.
"Yeah, in the first half I was just out of it. I just feel bad, I didn't make any plays, didn't do anything to help the team out to win the first half. But yeah, second half I thought we started to get in it. But they're a good team, and they just played way harder than us and hit more shots and just made more plays in the end.''
Madness in March is always a good thing. But when you're on the wrong end of it — especially playing in your home state in front of thousands of Gators fans — it's a hard pill to swallow for Florida.
And for Iowa, it's quite the splash under McCollum and his Hawkeyes. Now they're off to Houston, where they will see a familiar foe, Big Ten rival Nebraska. They'll play Thursday night at the Toyota Center in Houston. The other game there is Houston at Illinois.
"As far as my guys go, it's just tough,'' McCollum said of his Hawkeyes. "That's all it is. It's just tough kids. They fight. They compete. They stick with it. They exemplify everything that we've wanted in Iowa basketball. They've established the foundation that we've desperately needed, and couldn't be any more proud of them.''