Why each Final Four team has a chance to win the 2025 men’s basketball national championship

There has been no college basketball season in recent memory where it felt like the gap between the sport’s four or five best teams and the rest of the country was as wide as the one we’ve seen over the past five months.

With that being the case, it seems beyond fitting that the 2024-25 campaign will end with all four No. 1 seeds heading to the Final Four for just the second time in NCAA tournament history.

It always felt like it was going to be one of these four, but which member of the quartet will be the final one standing? Let’s make the case for each one.

Duke

The case for the Blue Devils is pretty much as straightforward as an argument can be.

They have the most talented roster of the four teams remaining, they have the most talented overall player in the sport, and the numbers say they aren’t just the best team in the country, they say they’re one of the best teams in the history of college basketball.

Oh, and they seem to be playing better right now than they have at any other point in the season.

Duke’s overall Net Efficiency Rating in Ken Pomeroy’s model (the Bible of college basketball) is 39.63. That’s the second-best rating of any team since the inception of KenPom, which goes back to the 1996-97 season. The only team with a better overall ranking is the 1998-99 Blue Devils.

The only real criticism of Duke coming into the NCAA tournament was that the Blue Devils had feasted on a down ACC over the preceding couple of months. Any concerns that facing a lack of top-tier competition since the calendar turned to 2025 may have adversely affected Duke’s chances of winning six straight against the best from the rest of college basketball have been quickly put to bed.

The Blue Devils, the nation’s best offensive team according to every metric in existence, have scored 85 or more points in all four of their NCAA tournament contests. They’ve won those four contests by an average of 23.5 points. Even if you take the round one blowout of Mount St. Mary’s out of the equation, Duke has smashed a trio of opponents from the Big 12 and the SEC — Baylor, Arizona and Alabama — by a combined 50 points.

Cooper Flagg is a unicorn and the No. 1 pick in the 2025 NBA Draft. You know this. The play of his supporting cast — starting with their run to an ACC tournament championship with Flagg sidelined — is what has the Blue Devils situated as the betting favorites heading to San Antonio.

Fellow freshmen future lottery picks Kon Knueppel and Khaman Maluach have taken their games to another level in March. Maluach was the best big man in the East Region, averaging 11.5 points, 6.5 rebounds and blocking eight total shots in Duke’s four wins. Knueppel is the elite secondary scorer that crushes the souls of opponents who focus the entirety of their defensive energy on slowing down Flagg. Knueppel dropped 20 in the regional semifinal win over Arizona, and then led the Devils with 21 in their triumph over Alabama two days later.

The veterans on Jon Scheyer’s roster are also producing at an absurd pace. Most notably, junior guard Tyrese Proctor has been out of his mind from beyond the arc. In four tournament games, Proctor is a scorching 16-of-25 from three. He also has 12 assists against just four turnovers.

There are no glaring weaknesses with this Duke team at the moment. Despite the ACC’s inability to provide the Devils with adequate competition during the heart of the winter, Scheyer’s squad is two wins away from being remembered as one of the best college basketball teams in recent memory.

Florida

After successfully running the gauntlet in Nashville to win the SEC Tournament, Florida entered the Big Dance widely regarded as the hottest team in the country and perhaps the trendiest pick to cut down the nets.

None of the four teams left standing have stared the death of their season more directly in the face than the Gators.

First, there was a second round showdown with back-to-back reigning national champion UConn where the Huskies appeared to be in complete control for the game’s first 30 minutes. Two rounds later, Florida trailed third-seeded Texas Tech 75-66 with less than three minutes to play before staging a furious rally to secure their first trip to the Final Four since 2014.

In both of these instances, there was one major reason why Todd Golden’s team survived and advanced: Walter Clayton Jr.

Star guards tend to shine the brightest in March, and Clayton Jr.’s play over the past few weeks has more than a few people uttering his name in the same breath as Kemba Walker.

Clayton Jr. and backcourt mates Alijah Martin and Will Richard get the lion’s share of the credit for Florida being the second-best offensive team in the country, but the Gators have had one of the best backcourt/frontcourt blends all season.

The emergence of Alex Condon and his ability to control paint on both ends of the floor has been the biggest difference between this year’s Gators and last year’s team. Fellow sophomore big Thomas Haugh is coming off the best game of his college career to date, scoring 20 points and grabbing 11 boards in the win over Texas Tech. Florida’s bigs are also tremendous passers, which makes UF’s lethal outside shooters all the more dangerous.

In its win over Michigan State, Auburn allowed the Spartans to corral 13 offensive rebounds. That type of effort on the defensive glass won’t fly against Florida, which is the 5th-best offensive rebounding team in the country.

The most self-explanatory reason to believe Florida can topple Auburn on Saturday? They’ve already done it. The Gators pulled off an incredibly impressive 90-81 road win over the Tigers back on Feb. 8.

That win seemed to serve as the catalyst for Golden’s team to take its play to another level and position itself for a national championship run.

Houston

Have you seen these dudes play defense?

Trying to score on these Cougars seems like just about the worst possible time you could have playing the game of basketball.

The nation’s best defensive team has held its opponents to fewer than 60 points in 22 of their 38 games so far this season. Only five teams have managed to score 70 points or more against the Cougars in regulation.

Watching them this March, it’s almost shocking that the number is that high.

Ok, but what about the offense?

Well, Houston shoots the three at a collective 39.7 percent clip. That’s the best average of any of the teams heading to San Antonio and the third best average of any team in the country. Leading scorers L.J. Cryer, Emmanuel Sharp and Milos Uzan all are shooting better than 41 percent from beyond the arc, and all have the ability to get quality shots either through the team’s halfcourt offense or in iso situations.

A historically chalky tournament means that none of the No. 1 seeds have gotten a cakewalk to the Final Four, but none of them have been quite as battle-tested as Houston.

The Cougars faced a 16-seed an 8-seed a 4-seed and a 2-seed to punch their ticket to San Antonio, making them the first No. 1 seed since North Carolina in 2017 to take the hardest path possible to the Final Four.

Just seeing the seeds doesn’t really do the road justice.

In the second round Houston had to face perhaps the toughest 8-seed in the history of the tournament, a Gonzaga team that not only ranked in the top 10 of virtually ever college basketball metric on the planet, but which was looking to make the Sweet 16 for a record-breaking 10th consecutive year. After surviving that test, they had the reigning national runners-up from Purdue — a program which had been a No. 1 seed in each of the past two years — waiting in the Sweet 16. Standing between the Cougars and the Final Four was a team in Tennessee that was ranked by the Committee as the best 2-seed, and was also a team that had spent a chunk of the 2024-25 season ranked No. 1 in the country.

Despite all of this, UH controlled the lion’s share of the action in all but one of those four games, a back-and-forth 62-60 win over the Boilermakers in the Sweet 16.

Saturday’s nightcap will feature the No. 1 team in the country in adjusted defensive efficiency (Houston) facing the No. 1 team in the country in adjusted offensive efficiency (Duke). The last time we got that matchup in a national semifinal was 2015, when undefeated Kentucky squared off against Wisconsin.

That matchup saw a “potential greatest college team of all-time” come up short two wins shy of a national title. Could history be on the verge of repeating itself?

Houston might be the “Cinderella” of this Final Four — which feels ridiculous to type because it is — but they have the nation’s longest winning streak at 17 games, they have a head coach in Kelvin Sampson who may have done the most unbelievable job of any coach in the country over the past decade, and they have a remarkable combination of veteran offensive talent and the most suffocating team defense in the country.

There’s a lot to like here.

Auburn

It’s been true for the last five months and it’s true today: When everything is clicking, there isn’t a more dominant or fun team to watch in college basketball than the Auburn Tigers.

No coach in the country has a deeper array of lethal weapons at his disposal than Bruce Pearl does.

National Player of the Year candidate Johni Broome is the rock and the conversation starter, as he should be. But around Broome, you’ve got a Swiss Army Knife in Chad Baker-Mazara, rock solid performers in Miles Kelly and Denver Jones, and — when he gets going — one of the best pure scorers in the sport in Tahaad Pettiford.

The tournament’s No. 1 overall seed, Auburn played one of the most ridiculous regular season schedules the sport has ever seen. Over their 33 regular season games, the Tigers played 24 contests against teams that would eventually make the NCAA tournament. Their 16 Quadrant-I victories were easily the most of any team in the country, and the most of any team since the advent of the NET Rankings.

Also, they’re old. Like, super, super old.

Its combination of experience, depth and versatility make Auburn the most “ready for any type of situation” team of the four left standing. They’ve showcased that strength throughout March already.

After trailing at halftime, the Tigers ran away from offensive-minded Creighton in an up-tempo second round game. They won by 13 thanks to their defense (and Pettiford and Jones going nuts) in a Sweet 16 game against Michigan that got a little sloppy. And then they took an early lead and kept Michigan State at arm’s length for the duration of a more of a grind-it-out, halfcourt contest in the Elite Eight.

They have a tendency to burn a little hot, but as long as they’re channeling all that energy in a positive way, there’s zero reason to think Auburn isn’t capable of winning its final two games of the season.

No team has spent a larger chunk of this season looking like the sport’s most dominant force than Auburn has. Sometimes the simplest conclusion is the correct one.