Players run up the court during the 2024 NCAA men's national championship game.
NCAA Men’s National Championship Game (via @HoopMixOnly Twitter)

The University of Connecticut men’s basketball team won its second consecutive NCAA national championship on Monday as they suffocated and dominated the Purdue Boilermakers in the second half of the game.

It was billed as a big-man battle between Purdue’s Zach Edey against UConn’s Donovan Clingan, and although Edey would have his way for much of the time in the NCAA title game, his teammates didn’t have his back much and it led to a blowout when it was all said and done.

In that first half, one video started to make the rounds on social media but it had little to do with the actual teams, but one ref in particular that began to steal the show.

With less than nine minutes to play, the Purdue Boilermakers were making their way down the court and the ref at the bottom of the screen could be seen hilariously doing high knees to stay within the action of the NCAA championship game.

The ref running in such a strange way had hundreds of fans commenting about it:

Ref hittin the yoinky sploinky down the court

Unk the 🐐 thats his signature run

Bro bout to sell the game for his parlay later🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

lol so many times this guy has reffed a game and I haven’t noticed it was him until I saw him run 😂 love it

High knees made this season tolerable

When you get older you gotta find ways to stay loose

The ref got them “why I oughta” strides 😂

That referee is actually well-known as Jeff Anderson. Last weekend marked the seventh straight Final Four at which the NCAA referee Jeff Anderson has officiated.

As you saw above, he was also asked to officiate the National Championship game as well.

Monday night marked the Corning Community College grad’s third overall NCAA Championship game.

Anderson played the game as well during his younger years as he still remains the all-time assists leader in Corning Community College men’s basketball history, according to Democratandchronicle.com.

It is not often a well-known referee gets talked about and it’s for a good thing, so we can only hope to continue to see Anderson during more NCAA games in the future.

The UConn Huskies Made NCAA History With a National Championship Win Over Purdue

UConn players after NCAA National Championship game (Photo by Jamie Squire/Getty Images)
The UConn Huskies are the talk of the NCAA world after they won back-to-back men’s NCAA basketball titles since 2007.

Connecticut became the first Division I men’s college basketball team to win back-to-back championships since the Florida Gators did it 17 years ago.