March Madness: UConn  routs San Diego State to win fifth NCAA men's basketball championship

HOUSTON — After six games and 240 minutes of pure dominance that ran through March, then part of April, it finally became clear that there was only one thing that could end the UConn Huskies’ run.

The final buzzer.

The team from Storrs, Connecticut, capped one of the most impressive March Madness runs in history Monday night, breaking things open late to bring home its fifth national title with a 76-59 win over San Diego State.

“We knew we were the best team in the tournament going in, and we just had to play to our level,” coach Dan Hurley said.

Hurley is the third coach to bring a trophy home to Storrs. He joins Jim Calhoun (1999, 2004, 2011) and Kevin Ollie (2014).

“We have the four national championships coming in, right?” Hurley said. “We were striving for No. 5. Now we’ve got our own.”

UConn’s star forward, Adama Sanogo, won Most Outstanding Player honors, finishing with 17 points and 10 rebounds in the final. Tristen Newton also had a double-double with 19 points and 10 boards.

Sanogo averaged 19.7 points and 9.8 rebounds during UConn’s six-game cruise through the tournament.

The Huskies (31-8) became the fifth team since the bracket expanded in 1985 to win all six NCAA Tournament games by double-digits on the way to a championship. They won those six games by an average of an even 20 points, only a fraction less than what North Carolina did in sweeping to the title in 2009.

UConn built a 16-point lead late in the first half but saw the Aztecs (32-7) trim the lead to five with 5:19 left. But Jordan Hawkins (16 points) — whose cousin, Angel Reese of national champion LSU, won MOP honors in the women’s tournament — answered with a three-pointer to trigger a 9-0 run.

“We cut it to five. I think there were people in the stands that thought, ‘Hey, they’re capable of doing it again,’ and we were,” San Diego State coach Brian Dutcher said. “But we ran into too good of a team.”

Dutcher was an assistant with Michigan back in the Fab Five days, when the Wolverines lost in the final two years in a row. Now he’s 0-for-3 in the big one. One of the Fab Five, current Wolverines coach Juwan Howard, was there to console his former coach.

“We had to be at our best. We weren’t at our best,” Dutcher said. “A lot had to do with UConn.”

Keshad Johnson scored 14 points for San Diego State and Darrion Trammell and Lamont Butler had 13 apiece.

UConn, the favorite and best-seeded team at No. 4 for this Final Four, set the stage for this win with an 11:07 stretch in the first half during which the Aztecs didn’t make a single basket. Unable to shoot over or go around this tall, long UConn team, they missed 14 straight shots from the floor.

“We were talking about it for sure,” Butler said. “And we were trying to figure out what we can do to stop the scoring drought and create advantages for ourselves. We tried but things weren’t working.”

They went from leading by four to trailing by 11, and when they weren’t getting shots blocked (Alex Karaban had three and Sanogo had one) or altered on the inside, they were coming up short — a telltale sign of a team that was out of hops after a draining 72-71 buzzer-beating win over Florida Atlantic two nights earlier.

Even with that brief bout of uncertainty midway through the second half, UConn never truly let the fifth-seeded Aztecs, who overcame a 14-point deficit in the semifinal, start thinking about any more last-second dramatics.

This was a UConn team built strictly for 2023 — replenished by Hurley, who didn’t get much love in the preseason, even after he went to the transfer portal to find more outside shooting after back-to-back first-round exits in the tournament.

“We weren’t ranked going into the year, so we had the chip on our shoulder,” Hurley said. “We knew the level that we could play at, even through those dark times.”