Zero-star recruit Walter Clayton Jr. is now Florida’s greatest basketball player of all time

Walter Clayton Jr., grinning like an alligator, stood on top of a ladder in the Alamodome with loops of national championship net draped around his neck, and gave one final Gator chomp before descending back to the same plane as the mere mortals who will be long forgotten years from now when Florida basketball fans still talk about Clayton and the way he willed his team to the 2025 national championship.

A 0-star recruit turned Consensus First-Team All-American and Most Outstanding Player of the NCAA Tournament, Clayton was the perfect leader for a team that thrived in building, as fellow Florida guard Alijah Martin put it, the “underdog legacy.”

Clayton had more football scholarship offers than basketball ones, but he bet on himself, unbothered by outside noise or a lack of external belief. Clayton knew who he was and what he was capable of being. It was a question of consistency in the face of constant doubters.

“Basketball was my first love,” Clayton told SDS last month. “It was really about consistency, about building good habits, constantly being in the gym. Confidence has never been a problem. It’s basketball. Some shots go in. Some don’t. They’re going up. That’s just kind of me. I don’t get too high. I don’t get too low. You have to stay focused on the moment at hand.”

Clayton’s steadiness was useful as expectations on what he was truly able to do on a basketball court grew.

After winning MAAC Player of the Year as a sophomore at Iona, Clayton opted to come back to his home state and play for the Gators. The safe basketball bet might have been to stay with Hall of Fame head coach Rick Pitino, who was headed to the Big East and a high profile rebuild at St. John’s.

But Clayton loved the idea of being closer to home and he saw something of himself in young Florida head coach Todd Golden, a former walk-on at Saint Mary’s who understood what it meant to be doubted.

“When I got here, I was a little bit of an older version of myself. I also knew I had more to prove. But I knew Coach Golden had a plan and I knew he had worked to get where he wanted to be, just like me,” Clayton said. “I think that and getting to play by my Mama and my baby girl, all of that helped make the decision for me.”

Clayton was outstanding as a junior at Florida, averaging 17.6 points per game and shooting 37% from deep on his way to All-SEC honors. He also foreshadowed what was to come in the NCAA Tournament, going on an otherworldly heater to score 33 points in a heartbreaking, final possession NCAA Tournament loss to Colorado.

Clayton tested the NBA waters but opted to return to Florida for one more season. That’s when the doubters returned.

The media picked Florida 6th in the SEC in the preseason, despite returning Clayton and 2 other starters from a 24-win team. Making the doubt louder was the fact that much of the skepticism around Florida centered on the perception that Florida lacked a “true point guard.” Clayton played off the ball in 2023-24, and Golden opted to move his sharpshooting scorer to lead guard in 2024-25, rather than hitting the portal for what folks perceived as a proven point guard player.

Golden and Clayton never doubted that Walter would meet the challenge.

“Whenever I’ve played, I have been a combo, spent time on the ball and off the ball. So, it was just about getting comfortable on the ball a little more, improving little things like decision-making. It wasn’t too much about learning,” Clayton told SDS.

Golden’s instincts to trust Clayton to run the offense proved correct.

Clayton doubled his assist rate from 12.7 in 2023-2024 to 25.6 in SEC play, while improving his scoring average by a point per game and his 3-point shooting percentage to a career high 39% despite higher volume. The wins piled up for Florida, as did Clayton’s signature performances. In a win at No. 1 Auburn on February 8, Clayton poured in 19 points and dished out 9 assists, the best player on the floor in a game featuring multiple All-SEC hoopers and two future First-Team All-Americans. In a showdown with Alabama’s star Mark Sears in Tuscaloosa on March 5, Clayton scored 22 points and handed out 8 assists, outplaying his fellow All-American on Sears’ Senior Night. Whatever the moment, Clayton seemed to meet it.

And that was before Clayton stormed through the month of March on a date with NCAA Tournament immortality.

“His growth this year, was, I think, exceptional,” Todd Golden told SDS after Florida won the SEC Tournament, where Clayton was, to no one’s surprise, named MVP. “I’m not sure he ever received the national recognition he deserved in that way because we all know how difficult the transition from being a score-first, off-ball guard to lead guard is and Walt has done it seamlessly.”

What Clayton did in the NCAA Tournament was beyond something due north of exceptional.

By scoring 30 and 34 points against Texas Tech and Auburn, respectively, the Florida star became the first player since Larry Bird– no, really, Larry Bird — in 1979 to drop 30 or more points in consecutive Elite Eight and Final Four games. Clayton also made a stunning total of 5 3-point shots in the final 4 minutes of basketball games that either tied or gave Florida the lead.

Clayton’s 134 points scored in Florida’s run to the national championship were the most by any single player since Kemba Walker’s iconic run with UConn in 2011. In fact, Clayton’s numbers compared with Walker’s dazzling run through the NCAA Tournament are eerily similar in terms of the staggering excellence: Walker edges Clayton in points, 141-134 and Cardiac Kemba had more assists, 34-20. But Clayton shot a higher percentage from 3 (43.4% to 29%, with 9 more makes) and the free throw line (91% to 84%, with 42 makes each).

Both had national semifinals that will live forever in hoop dreams and imaginations, with Walker’s 18-point, 7-assist, 6-rebound performance lifting UConn past Kentucky 56-55 in a memorable 2011 semifinal and Clayton’s 34-point, 4-rebound effort against Auburn the difference in an incredible semifinal in its own right. And while Clayton Jr. was corralled more than Walker in the national championship game, he’ll always have the one shining closeout on the Florida defensive stand that won the Gators their third national championship.

Until this season, Florida, a program with 6 Final Fours, 10 Elite Eights, a top-10 winning percentage this century and several NBA lottery picks, had never produced a First-Team All-American. Clayton ended that oddity, earning Consensus First-Team All-American honors. It was an honor even the typically stoic Clayton couldn’t believe.

“Definitely surprising that’s the first in history, I would have thought one of them guys, Al Horford, Joakim, Brewer, Green one of them would have got it so, it’s a surprise but just thankful, thankful for all my teammates, all my coaches,” Clayton told the media with a wide grin last month.

Now, in addition to that history, he’s a national champion. For Florida basketball, he’s almost certainly more than that. The debate is a reasonable one to have but the evidence points to Clayton being the greatest Florida basketball player of all-time.

Yes, Joakim Noah tore through March in his own way in 2006, setting what was then the NCAA Tournament record for blocked shots in a single tournament (29) and playing a pivotal role in Florida’s repeat a season later. But Noah played in the frontcourt with Al Horford, who had a better NCAA Tournament than Noah in 2007, grabbing 68 rebounds and posting multiple NCAA Tournament double-doubles on the way to a second ring. And it was Corey Brewer, not Noah, who was the Most Outstanding Player in the 2007 NCAA Tournament, averaging 16 points and 5.5 rebounds per contest and punctuating that run with a 13-point, 8-rebound, 3-steal effort in the national championship game win over Ohio State.

To suggest Clayton is the best Florida hooper of all time should not be read as a knock on any of the sensational players that came before him, or on Clayton’s phenomenal supporting cast, which includes All-SEC performer Alex Condon and the best 6th man in college basketball in Thomas Haugh.

It’s just a testament to Clayton’s greatness, the singular excellence of his run through the SEC and NCAA Tournaments, the seamless change from off-ball scorer to point guard of a national champion, and the clutch shot-making that again and again rescued the Gators from the brink.

Even in the national title game, Clayton found a way to be great, posting a personal NCAA Tournament best 7 assists, grabbing 5 rebounds, and scoring 9 of his 11 points in the final 8 minutes before his game-winning closeout of Houston’s Emanuel Sharp sealed the title for the Gators.

While other Gators legends may stake a claim to being as important, long-term, as Clayton, especially early 5-star commitments like Udonis Haslem and Mike Miller, who laid the foundation for Florida’s hoop greatness this century, no commitment or recruitment was as vital to Florida finding its ceiling again under Todd Golden than Clayton.

“I think in every program, everywhere you are trying to either build something or get it back to what it was, there are inflection points. There is a recruiting battle you have to win. For us, Walter Clayton Jr. picking Florida was that battle,” Todd Golden said last month, reflecting on his All-American after Florida’s SEC Tournament title. “We are all very grateful he’s a Gator. But I think the best part of it, for me, is how much he loves being here at Florida.”

But even on his rise to stardom and GOAT status, Clayton never lost sight of who he was.

Clayton even had the wherewithal, before the confetti cannons erupted, to console Sharp on the court in a stroke of empathy by someone who had no obligation to do so in the defining moment of his career.

Moments after the horn sounded in San Antonio, before the nets were cut and trophies were awarded on the best sporting night of Clayton’s life, the Florida star found and consoled Sharp, who was sitting on the floor, hands over his face in defeat. There was Clayton, a consummate underdog, showing the grace of someone who knows dejection and being counted out all too well.

It’s fitting, in that way, that the humble but confident leader of a bunch of players who recruiting experts and analysts suggested shouldn’t be at a place like Florida, leaves it a national champion and the greatest Florida basketball player of all time.

At a program that bucked the odds to become a national power, Clayton, an unlikely superstar who came from the bottom but ended atop an Alamodome ladder cutting nets, is an all too appropriate and worthy greatest of all time.

Neil Blackmon covers Florida football and the SEC for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.