The 2023 NCAA Tournament Championship Game is set, and after a wild Saturday round of semifinals it will be No. 4 UConn squaring off against No. 5 San Diego State on Monday night in Houston (9:20 p.m., CBS).

There’s a lot at play here for both teams, coaches and programs. UConn is looking for its fifth National Championship since 1999 but first since 2014, while San Diego State is playing for the school’s first men’s basketball national championship and had not even made the Final Four prior to this season. 

UConn’s Dan Hurley and San Diego State’s Brian Dutcher have the potential to win their first national championship as a head coach, though Dutcher did reach the heights of the sport as an assistant with Steve Fisher at Michigan. Each team has its own unique motivations, too, like the five San Diego State players who won 30 games and were trending towards a top-two seed prior to the NCAA Tournament being canceled in 2020. 

UConn’s charge is for the restoration of glory, yes, but more specifically the journey it’s taken to build to this point and the upperclassmen who have been a part of it. The Huskies went five years between NCAA Tournament appearances before finally returning to the field in 2021. After two straight first-round exits, UConn’s next step was to prove it could get out of the first weekend. Here in 2023, players like Adama Sanogo and Andre Jackson — freshmen during that 2021 season — can take pride in bringing the program back to the top of the sport. 

But those are just a few of the many layers to this national championship. Lets get into a few more storylines heading into Monday night. 

San Diego State elite in the clutch 

Dutcher’s decision not to call timeout and let his players decide the national semifinal will remain a fascinating angle to the final moments of the Aztecs’ epic buzzer-beater over FAU on Saturday night. Lamont Butler wanted to get to the rim but it was closed off, so he had to work to the outside and release on what immediately became one of the most iconic shots in Final Four history. Dutcher has discussed all tournament how this team has experience that has garnered his trust, but trustworthiness also comes from the experience of success this season in close games. 

Beating FAU improved San Diego State to 10-1 this season in games decided by five points or fewer. Playing a grinder style with slower tempo and elite defense does make it more likely to end up in close games, but the fact that the Aztecs continually come out on top speaks to the high-level execution on both ends of the floor. 

Back-to-back one-point wins in the Elite Eight and Final Four also put San Diego State in exclusive company among notable clutch performances in tournament history. The 2023 Aztecs are just the third team ever to win back-to-back NCAA Tournament games by exactly one point (2018 Loyola, 1981 Saint Josephs) and just the second team ever to win back-to-back tournament games in the final two seconds. The other was Butler in 2011, which got two game-winners from Matt Howard en route to a national championship game appearance, where the Bulldogs lost to … UConn. 

Huskies’ nonconference dominance continues 

Any coach will boast about their league being “the best in the country,” but Dan Hurley’s been able to speak to it from a different perspective given UConn’s results this year. Much was made of the Huskies’ streaky results during the season, starting 14-0 then going 2-6 before course-correcting and winning 14 of its next 16 games. Hurley has pointed out, however, that UConn’s setback came in the grind of a tough Big East, where the Huskies finished fourth with a 13-7 league record. Now that UConn is in the NCAA Tournament and playing nonconference teams, everyone is seeing results closer to the dominance of that 14-0 start. 

And Hurley’s right. 

UConn is now 16-0 against nonconference opponents this season, winning each game by double digits. And while that nonconference slate included the likes of Stonehill and Delaware State, the full body of work (including the tournament) includes double-digit wins over four of the top 20 teams in the final AP Top 25: No. 1 Alabama, No. 9 Gonzaga, No. 16 Miami and No. 19 Saint Mary’s. UConn plays with an intensity and a level of execution that cannot be replicated in practice until you see it live. By the time these tournament teams adjust to the style, the Huskies have already put the game out of reach. 

UConn’s “blue blood” argument on trial 

UConn is one win away from claiming its fifth national championship in men’s basketball since 1999. Only UCLA (11), Kentucky (8) and North Carolina (6) would be able to claim more; the Huskies would be in a tie for fourth with Duke and Indiana. 

Keeping that kind of company has brought back college basketball’s long-standing blue-blood debate, this time focused on whether UConn should qualify in the wake of this resurgence under Hurley. History has played a significant role in the blue-blood discussion. Programs who can trace national prominence back to the mid-20th century established their reputations as powers in the sport prior to college basketball’s explosion in popularity. When Jim Calhoun won his first national championship with UConn in 1999, not only had the blue-bloods club been established but UCLA (1995), North Carolina (1993), Duke (1991, 1992) and Kentucky (1996, 1998) had combined to win six of the previous eight national titles. 

Since 1999, however, UConn has won four national titles and is chasing its fifth. Five national titles since 1999 is two more than any one of those schools — Duke (3), North Carolina (3), Kentucky (1), UCLA (0) — in that span. The idea of 1999 sounded futuristic once, and then still felt recent, but here in 2023 it’s becoming a fair starting point for modern history era of college basketball. In that era, UConn is not only a blue blood, but perhaps the most dominant of them all.  

Check out the TV and streaming information for the 2023 NCAA Tournament Championship Game between No. 4 UConn and No. 5 San Diego State below.  

National Championship

Monday, April 3 — 9:20 p.m. (CBS)
NRG Stadium — Houston