How The Baylor Bears Won The National Championship: Live Updates

Just two nights before the title showdown, Gonzaga had prevailed in one of the most sensational games in the history of the N.C.A.A.’s men’s tournament, a 93-90 thriller against U.C.L.A. But on Monday, the Bears openly overpowered the Bulldogs, who started to rally a modest defense once they switched to zone.

It was still far too much.

Baylor seized rebounds. Especially early, it seemed to score on command and control the game’s flow and capitalize on one turnover after the next by Gonzaga, which entered Monday night hoping to become the first men’s Division I team since 1976 to cap an undefeated campaign with a national title.

There were moments when Gonzaga seemed to inch back into the game. In the second half, for instance, the Bulldogs narrowed the gap to 9. Two layups, two free-throws, a 3-pointer and 94 seconds later, the Baylor lead had vaulted to 16.

Baylor’s shooting was imperfect — indeed, Gonzaga made a greater share of its shots. But it spread its scoring around. Jared Butler, a junior guard, led Baylor with 22 points, his record for this year’s tournament. MaCio Teague added 19 of his own. Baylor had 16 second-chance points and 21 from its bench.

Gonzaga, whose season-leading scorer Drew Timme became enveloped in foul trouble with more than 11 minutes to play in the game, did much of its scoring in the paint and struggled mightily with 3-pointers, making just 29 percent. Jalen Suggs, the star of Saturday’s victory, finished with 22 points, the most of any Bulldog on Monday.

Across 18 seasons under Coach Scott Drew, Baylor has risen into a juggernaut of the sport. The Bears had reached the round of 16 five times since 2010, and the round of 8 three times. It was not until this season, though, that Baylor stormed into the Final Four for the first time since 1950. And when it last played for a championship, in 1948, Kentucky set down a shellacking, 58-42, in the title game.

“Since 2008, we’ve won 18 or more,” Drew said on Saturday. “And us and Kansas are the only two Power Fives to do that. We’ve been consistently good. We just haven’t been able to get to a Final Four or national championship.”

Then they made the grandest stage of all and routed a team that had not lost since Feb. 22, 2020.

“We knew they’d make a run, this is a 40-minute game,” Baylor Coach Scott Drew said in a television interview. “We got to do a good job of guarding without fouling and then we got to get some free throws.”

The Bears were everywhere early on defense, contesting every pass and shot attempt. Baylor led 9-0, 16-4, 23-8, 29-10 and 35-16.

After going to the zone late in the first half, Gonzaga closed the half on a 21-12 spurt after trailing by as many as 19 points. Baylor forced eight turnovers — and scored 13 points from those turnovers.

To what degree Gonzaga is feeling a hangover from Saturday’s 93-90 victory over U.C.L.A. in the national semifinal? Are the Bulldogs tired? Or is it all about Baylor’s defense? Maybe all of the above?

Gonzaga shot just 12 of 22 and 1 of 6 from deep as stars Drew Timme, Corey Kispert and Suggs combined for 24 points.

On offense, Baylor shot 19 of 38 and 7 of 13 on 3-pointers. MaCio Teague led the way with 14 points and Jared Butler had 10.

Gonzaga is seeking to become the first team since Bob Knight’s Indiana club in 1976 to finish undefeated while winning the national championship.

This is just the fifth time since the Associated Press Top 25 preseason poll began in the early 1960s that the teams ranked No. 1 (Gonzaga) and No. 2 (Baylor) met in the title game. Each of the previous four games were won by the team ranked second: Cincinnati over Ohio State in 1962, U.C.L.A. over Michigan in 1965, UConn over Duke in 1999 and Duke over Arizona in 2001.

Baylor is now one half from continuing that trend.

“The protocols for the athletes and coaches were good and so they probably won’t have a problem with them,” Dr. John Swartzberg, an infectious disease expert and professor emeritus from the University of California, Berkeley, said on Monday. “Having fans in the stands, it’s not a good idea and there could be a problem from that.”

Spectators were permitted to attend all of the men’s games in Indiana, so long as they wore masks and stadiums mostly stayed below 22 percent capacity. Paying spectators who wore masks were allowed to watch the women’s games in the Alamodome beginning with the round of 16, with the Alamodome held below 17 percent capacity.

Many states, including Indiana and Texas, have done away with quarantine requirements for travelers, meaning that some spectators could have flown in for the games and flown out without restriction on either end.

“Any cross-state mobility introduces the risk of increasing the spread of different variants,” said Dr. Abraar Karan, a physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a global health researcher at Harvard Medical School.

Cases of the coronavirus in Indiana have increased 29 percent compared with 14 days ago, however the numbers are still significantly lower than they were two months ago, according to a New York Times database. The average number of new cases per day in the past week was 986. On Feb. 4, the average over the past week was 1,962 new cases per day. At least 18 percent of the state is fully vaccinated, according to The Times.

In Marion County, where Indianapolis is, there was an average of 113 cases per day in the past week, a 39 percent increase from two weeks ago when the tournament tipped off.

Cases have trended downward over the past two weeks in Texas — a decrease of 24 percent on average. There were about 2,943 new coronavirus cases per day in the last week, according to The Times. At least 16 percent of Texas’ population is fully vaccinated. In Bexar County, where San Antonio is, there has been an average of 231 cases per day over the past week, a 64 percent decrease from the average two weeks ago.

San Antonio health officials said in an email to The Times on Monday that they were not concerned about a spike following the N.C.A.A. women’s basketball tournament, which Stanford won yesterday, but did not elaborate. Marion County and Indiana state health officials did not respond to requests for comment.

Stanford celebrated with a parade on its campus and neighboring Palo Alto, Calif., on Monday after flying back from the tournament.

Drew, 50, has won 390 career games spanning 18 seasons at Baylor and one at Valparaiso, the school where his father, Homer Drew, coached for more than two decades. Scott Drew guided the Bears to two round of 8 appearances and an N.I.T. championship in the early 2010s, and now has the program in the title game for the first time since 1948.

Yet for all their accomplishments, neither Few nor Drew has won an N.C.A.A. championship. That will change for one of them on Monday night.

At that point, one of the coaches will join an elite fraternity, becoming the 11th active coach with at least one ring. Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski leads all active coaches with five titles, while Jim Calhoun, now coaching in Division III at the University of Saint Joseph, has three from his time at UConn.

The Bulldogs bench averages 23 points per game, while the Bears average 24.6, so the margin is not large. The difference maker here will be which of these benches can make the biggest impact, especially considering how quick the offensive pace is for both of these teams.

Suggs figures to be guarded by the 6-2 Mitchell, a Georgia native who averages nearly 2 steals a game along with 14 points and 5.5 assists. Mitchell was named the Naismith Defensive Player of the Year and also was honored as the Most Outstanding Player of the South Region.

“He’s a really good player, he’s really fast. He’s really quick,” Mitchell said. “I’ve just got to know when to pick my spots, and when I can pressure him and when not to pressure him, so I can’t put my teammates in a position where they’ve got to help me out and then leave somebody else open because they can hurt us like that, so my job is just to stay in front of him and make it hard for him.”

Baylor Coach Scott Drew, who is coaching for the program’s first national championship, said he’s looking forward to watching the two go at it.

“It’s a blessing because I get a great seat and watch it,” he said. “And hopefully neither gets in foul trouble because that’s going to be a matchup that everyone will want to watch. Both of them are extremely competitive, both of them are so talented and both of them, the bigger the moment, the better they play.”

“The way they shoot the ball — I think they’re hitting the 3 better collectively than anyone in the country — and they play off each other so well,” Few said. “They’re just complete.”

This is an area that Baylor can capitalize on tonight as it faces the undefeated Bulldogs. The Bears shoot 3-pointers better than any other team in the country — 41.2 percent — but can’t afford an off night if it expects to challenge Gonzaga the way the Bruins did.

“We have a reputation for calling them as we see them,” Kaplan said in an interview on Monday, when she described her firm’s inquiry as “completely independent.”

Mark Emmert, the N.C.A.A. president, said last week that neither he nor the association had any prior history with Kaplan or her firm, Kaplan Hecker & Fink. But he has so far resisted calls, most notably from the Women’s Basketball Coaches Association, for a review led by a commission or a lawyer selected by someone outside of N.C.A.A. leadership.

“I’ve got my lawyer in my back pocket, and I know he’s going to do what he needs to do to make me look good,” Dawn Staley, South Carolina’s women’s basketball coach, told Emmert during a videoconference last week. “And I’m not saying that is the case, but whoever is paying the piper, more than likely they’re going to give you what you want to hear.”

Emmert replied that he had confidence in Kaplan’s firm, but that he understood that there was “a perceptional issue.” He did not announce specific steps to try to ease those concerns.

In Monday’s interview, Kaplan declined to detail her financial arrangement with the N.C.A.A., but she said that the association, which has spent tens of millions of dollars on lawyers in recent years, had not capped her firm’s fees. She said the firm is early in its fact-finding stage, and she urged current and former athletes and coaches to contact investigators, who she said would be conducting interviews and town hall meetings in the coming weeks. She said some former coaches had already spoken to people involved in the review.

“The N.C.A.A. itself admits there clearly was a screw-up,” Kaplan said. But, she added, she wanted to review whether the disparities at the basketball tournaments were “just a symptom of a broader problem, which may not even be intentional.”

“It may,” she said, “just be decades-old assumptions about how things operate.”

Kaplan said that she expected her inquiry would be effectively conducted in two phases: the first, which has already begun, will focus on women’s basketball, while the second will examine other championships in other N.C.A.A.-sanctioned sports. She said that she expected the review to conclude by the end of the summer, but she left open the possibility that her inquiry into other sports could take longer.

Her findings and recommendations are expected to be made public.

The N.C.A.A. repeatedly apologized for shortcomings at its women’s tournament in Texas, like a weight room that was lightly stocked in comparison to workout facilities that were made available for the men’s competition. But women’s basketball officials said that the troubles of the last few weeks were part of a sustained history of men’s basketball, which is the N.C.A.A.’s financial lifeblood, being favored over their sport.

That speculation ended Monday, hours before the national championship game, when the school named Hubert Davis, 50, as Williams’s successor. Davis, who helped lead the Tar Heels to the 1991 Final Four and most recently served as Williams’s associate head coach, becomes the first Black head coach in the program’s history.

Davis was set to be formally introduced during a news conference Tuesday afternoon.

“I am honored and humbled to be given the opportunity to lead this program,’‘ Davis said in a statement.

“I love this University. I played here, I earned my degree here, I fell in love with my wife here, I got married here, I moved here after I retired from the N.B.A. and I have raised my family here,” he added. “I am proud to lead this team, and I can’t wait for all that comes next.”

Several teams in the Big 12 have also been busy on the coaching carousel. Oklahoma on Friday named former Loyola-Chicago coach Porter Moser as the successor to Lon Krueger, who retired at 68. Krueger was one of just three coaches (along with Tubby Smith and Rick Pitino) to lead five universities to the N.C.A.A. tournament. Moser, 52, went 188-140 (.573) in 10 seasons at Loyola and led the Ramblers on a surprise run to the Final Four in 2018, with an assist from Sister Jean Dolores Schmidt, and then a round of 16 appearance this season.

The Moser news came on the same day Kansas signed Bill Self to a lifetime contract and one day after Texas hired Chris Beard away from Big 12 rival Texas Tech.

Self won a championship in 2008, but Kansas has recently been under N.C.A.A. scrutiny in the wake of the federal government’s investigation into corruption in college basketball. Self’s contract contains a clause that the university will not fire him for cause “due to any infractions matter that involves conduct that occurred on or prior to the date of full execution of this agreement.”

Beard led Texas Tech to the 2019 championship game, where the Red Raiders lost to Virginia. He began his career as a graduate assistant at Texas.

Texas Tech has had several players enter the transfer portal, and it’s possible some of them could follow Beard to Texas.

In the Big East, Marquette replaced the fired Steve Wojciechowski with Shaka Smart, who grew up in Madison, Wis., and has ties to the area. In six seasons at Texas, Smart failed to win an N.C.A.A. tournament game, and this year the No. 3-seeded Longhorns were stunned in the first round by No. 14 seed Abilene Christian.

At DePaul, the school is replacing Dave Leitao with longtime Oregon associate head coach Tony Stubblefield. The Big East will now have six Black head coaches among 11 men’s basketball teams.

“Amazing, we’ve worked hard through this struggle of a season but we stayed together,” guard Jalen Suggs, a Gonzaga freshman, said in a television interview after draining the game-winning shot in a 93-90 victory over U.C.L.A. late Saturday night.

“I can’t put this one into words, turning dreams into reality and now we get ready for Baylor,” Suggs said. “They’re a tough team.”

Even though Gonzaga has not lost since Feb. 22, 2020, against Brigham Young, the Bears have history on their side. This is just the fifth time since the Associated Press Top 25 preseason poll began in the early 1960s that the teams ranked No. 1 (Gonzaga) and No. 2 (Baylor) will meet in the title game. Each of the previous four games were won by the team ranked second: Cincinnati over Ohio State in 1962, U.C.L.A. over Michigan in 1965, UConn over Duke in 1999 and Duke over Arizona in 2001.

Led by Drew Timme’s 25 points, Gonzaga put up 56 points in the paint against U.C.L.A., and the Bears will have to have an answer for that. Baylor is led by experienced guards and wings, and its frontcourt players Mark Vital and Flo Thamba are solid if not spectacular.

Baylor is led by an all-American junior guard, Jared Butler, who had 17 points in the semifinal rout of Houston, and another junior guard, Davion Mitchell, who dished out 12 assists with 11 points as the Bears won, 78-59. After last year’s tournament was canceled because of the coronavirus pandemic, both Butler and the senior guard MaCio Teague tested the N.B.A. draft waters but opted to come back for another shot at the title.

“That was one of my goals, and I know some of my teammates’ goals, just to leave a legacy at Baylor, create Baylor as a blue blood,” Butler said.

Michigan State featured not only Johnson, then a sophomore, but also Greg Kelser, a 6-foot-7 forward who was later chosen in the first round of the N.B.A. draft.

“We felt that our zone could affect them,” Johnson said on CBS before the semifinal games. “We double-teamed Larry every chance we got and we were able to pull off the victory,” 75-64.

Bird averaged 28.6 points, 14.9 rebounds and 5.5 assists a game during his junior season after averaging 30 points as a sophomore and nearly 33 as a freshman. In the national semifinal against DePaul, he made 16 of 19 field-goal attempts and had 16 rebounds and nine assists.

Johnson, like many others in the basketball world, was hoping for a Gonzaga-Baylor final entering the Final Four.

“Gonzaga is such a well-balanced team, they can shoot from the outside, they got great inside players,” he said. “And that’s what we say with Baylor, they were dominant inside as well as outside.

“The best two teams in college basketball were Baylor and Gonzaga all season long.”

The Oklahoma State freshman point guard Cade Cunningham and the Southern California freshman 7-footer Evan Mobley are expected to be among the top picks along with Suggs, with many mock drafts projecting Cunningham at No. 1.

But Brian Sandifer, the director of the Grassroots Sizzle program for which Suggs played, believes the Minnesota native, 6-foot-4, deserves to be the top pick in part because of his history of winning. As a quarterback for Minnehaha Academy, Suggs’s team went 25-1 and appeared in two state championships, winning one. He was recruited by Ohio State and Notre Dame, among others, to play football.

“Jalen Suggs is the best player in the draft, period,” Sandifer said in a phone interview. “I’ve never wavered from that. If you watch how they play and you do the résumé checks on all the kids, Jalen Suggs has won at every level that he’s played, football, basketball, whatever.”