{"id":356774,"date":"2025-12-18T20:23:12","date_gmt":"2025-12-18T20:23:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/356774\/"},"modified":"2025-12-18T20:23:12","modified_gmt":"2025-12-18T20:23:12","slug":"floridas-7-foot-9-olivier-rioux-makes-college-basketball-history-with-dunk","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/356774\/","title":{"rendered":"Florida’s 7-foot-9 Olivier Rioux makes college basketball history with dunk"},"content":{"rendered":"

Florida’s 7-foot-9 Olivier Rioux makes college basketball history with dunk<\/a> originally appeared on The Sporting News<\/a>. Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

On a sleepy, blowout night for the Florida Gators<\/a> against St. Francis (PA), 7-foot-9 redshirt freshman Olivier Rioux made the fans in Gainesville go wild.<\/p>\n

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With less than a minute left, Rioux cut down the lane, received a pass and threw down a dunk.<\/p>\n

In that moment, Rioux became the tallest player to ever score a field goal in college basketball history.<\/p>\n

MORE:\u00a0No one has started their career like Cameron Boozer<\/a><\/p>\n

Rioux had gotten on the board at the foul line earlier this year, but this was his first made basket from the floor.<\/p>\n

This is his second season with the Gators. Rioux was on the national championship team, but he redshirted and didn’t play a second. He gained notoriety for cutting down a piece of the championship net without needing a ladder.<\/p>\n

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This was Rioux’s third appearance of the season. He has not carved out space for himself in Florida’s rotation.<\/p>\n

He attended IMG Academy before joining the Gators, and even there, Rioux was a bit more of a novelty than anything else.<\/p>\n

Clearly, you can’t teach height, and Rioux has that in abundance. He’ll still have to add strength and skill to make an impact as his college basketball career goes on.<\/p>\n

But for now, he has a moment to remember, a strong dunk that made the crowd go wild.<\/p>\n

MORE:\u00a0BYU’s AJ Dybantsa is making college hoops history, too<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Florida’s 7-foot-9 Olivier Rioux makes college basketball history with dunk originally appeared on The Sporting News. Add The…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":356775,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[22564,64,63,726,22566,195341,1226,156331,195340,85],"class_list":{"0":"post-356774","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-basketball","8":"tag-aj-dybantsa","9":"tag-au","10":"tag-australia","11":"tag-basketball","12":"tag-cameron-boozer","13":"tag-college-game","14":"tag-florida-gators","15":"tag-olivier-rioux","16":"tag-redshirt-freshman","17":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356774","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=356774"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/356774\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/356775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=356774"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=356774"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=356774"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}