SAN ANTONIO — There was a single minute remaining Saturday night, and the Houston Cougars were down six points to the Duke Blue Devils. The odds were not in Houston’s favor. Yet Kelvin Sampson, 39 games into his 36th season as a college head basketball coach, decided that it was not yet time to resort to desperate measures.
He would not start the usually futile process of deliberately fouling in order to extend the game. He would ride with what he’s always ridden. He would count on his team’s defense and rebounding to save them.
“Nope, we’re not going to foul,” Sampson said. “Because whatever shot they get, I just thought that we were going to contest it. It’d come down to whether we get a rebound.”
On the key possession at that point, trailing 67–61, Houston guarded as Duke drained the clock. The CBS broadcast crew remarked, with some surprise, that the Cougars were not electing to foul. Near the end of the shot clock, Duke’s Kon Knueppel drove to the basket with Houston’s Joseph Tugler defending him.
Knueppel got in the paint and offered a shot fake, hoping to get Tugler in the air and draw a foul. Tugler did not leave the ground, honoring one of Sampson’s defensive tenets: be the second guy off the floor, not the first.
“JoJo didn’t flinch,” Sampson said, then smiled. “Had he shot faked a second time, we probably would have been screwed.”
After one fake, Knueppel went up with the shot. Tugler, a bouncy 6' 7" with a 7' 6" wingspan, went with him and blocked it, Houston retrieved the rebound and went the other way with 47 seconds left. Emanuel Sharp offered a shot fake of his own that sent Duke freshman Cooper Flagg flying by, then buried a three-point shot. Suddenly it was a three-point game and a near-certain defeat was a one-possession game.
The rest of the rally for an all-time tournament comeback victory required more defense and more rebounding. A steal in full-court pressure led to a three-point shot that missed, but Tugler soared to dunk the rebound. A decision to foul Tyrese Proctor yielded a missed free throw, and a (questionable) foul on Flagg after a vigorous box-out by J’Wan Roberts.
Roberts, who has raised his free throw percentage from 51% to 63% year-over-year by shooting 150 free throws every day since June, went to the line and swished both, motioning with his hands before and after each pressurized shot for everyone to remain calm. Then the sixth-year senior, the embodiment of the Houston program, defended national player of the year Flagg at the other end, forcing a fallaway jumper that came up short. Two more Houston free throws and a flailing final Duke possessions ended it—the Cougars had gone on a 9–0 run in the final 35 seconds for the biggest victory in the program’s slightly cursed history.
This was Houston culture distilled to a minute of pure-grain perfection. It was everything the 69-year-old Sampson has built in the final stop of a long and checkered career. No active coach in college basketball has a more readily identifiable style of play, one that never wavers and rarely fails.
“We fight,” Sharp said. “That’s really the culture.”
Houston culture is built upon the most basic building block in athletics: relentless effort. The areas where effort plays are most often rewarded are defense (Houston is No. 1 in the nation, per KenPom’s analytics) and rebounding (Houston is No. 10 in offensive rebound percentage). Everyone goes hard all the time, or they take a seat and watch their teammates go hard all the time. When that effort is augmented with elite athleticism—and, in recent years, high-level offensive skill—Houston culture is a tough out.
The Cougars have won 30 games in four straight seasons. They now shoot the ball at an elite level, leading the nation in three-point accuracy, but the program’s North Star remains a willingness to turn every game into an alley fight. They aspire to be the toughest team on the court at all times.
“Everyone’s always talking about how rough Houston is,” Sharp said. “You should see our practices. But we don’t run from it. We don’t care what other people say about it, it’s gotten us to a national championship.”
It has been a long time coming, with so much tournament heartbreak. Houston is probably the most accomplished program to never win a national title. Throughout college basketball history, the Cougars have habitually been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Their great teams of 1966–67 and ’67–68, powered by future Hall of Famer Elvin Hayes, ran into the only superior team and superior big man: Lew Alcindor and the UCLA Bruins. Houston was a combined 58–6 those two seasons but lost to UCLA in the Final Four both times.
From 1979 to ’85, the NCAA tournament exploded in popularity thanks to a succession of spectacular Final Fours that featured several famous names and games—the run began with Bird vs. Magic and ended with the Villanova Wildcats’ “perfect game” to upset the Georgetown Hoyas. Houston’s footnote during that time was being a three-time Final Four participant and zero-time champion.
The Phi Slama Jama teams from 1981–82 through ’83–84 were a prominent part of that golden era, a dazzling and colorful group that played above the rim with Hall of Famers Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon. Here is what beat Phi Slama Jama: In '82, it was the North Carolina Tar Heels featuring Dean Smith, Michael Jordan, James Worthy and Sam Perkins in the semifinals; in '83, it was a North Carolina State Wolfpack air ball that serendipitously fell into the hands of Lorenzo Charles for a walk-off dunk in the title game; and in '84, it was tower of power Patrick Ewing and Georgetown in the title game.
Bad timing. Bad luck.
Think of this: In 1985–86, the shot clock entered the college game. Had it been in use during the Phi Slama Jama era, the 54–52 slog against NC State likely would have ended much differently. The Wolfpack held the ball for more than 45 seconds before the flukish finish.
More recently, Sampson got the Cougars back to the Final Four in 2021. There they ran into the Baylor Bears, an underrated wagon of a team, rolling through a strange pandemic season and tournament. The Bears went 28–2 and beat every NCAA tourney opponent by at least nine points.
Now Sampson gets another crack at it. If he wins, he will be the oldest coach to ever claim the men's NCAA tournament title, at age 69, and the fifth coach of color to do so. It would complete quite the career arc.
Sampson became a pariah for rules violations that are downright quaint today—impermissible phone calls and text messages to recruits. That doesn’t absolve him—the rules were clear, as were the violations, and he did the same thing as coach of both the Oklahoma Sooners and Indiana Hoosiers. (There were other issues as well at Indiana, including leaving behind a team in dismal academic standing.) The National Association of Basketball Coaches reprimanded Sampson and scolded him publicly after the Oklahoma infractions, which predated the Indiana violations.
But the phone call rules were changed not long after Sampson violated them, and in the hierarchy of college basketball violations, they now seem like small potatoes. Tater tots, almost. Nevertheless, the serial rule-breaking earned him a five-year show-cause penalty that exiled him to the NBA as an assistant coach with the Milwaukee Bucks and Houston Rockets.
When Sampson’s show-cause penalty expired, then-Houston athletic director Mack Rhoades moved to hire him. It was a controversial decision at the time, but it triggered the rebirth of Cougars basketball after two dormant decades. In a sport full of scandals great and small—and attempted comebacks from them—Sampson’s career has become the ultimate survivor’s tale.
After an initial losing season, Sampson got back to winning 20 games per year. Then by Year 4 he had the Cougars in the NCAA tournament every season. Over the last eight seasons, he’s never lost more than eight games. The last eight teams have all been top-10 defensive units, with this year’s group the best yet.
Along the way, Houston culture solidified into a monolith, unbreakable. New players adapt to it, not the other way around. Veteran Cougars say that everyone thinks they play hard when they arrive—then they learn how much harder they have to play to fit in.
“It ain’t no tiptoeing into the culture,” Roberts said. “You surrender to it right away.”
Surrender early, thrive later. Do hard things, do them harder than your opponents, and do them for 40 minutes. That’s the basic building block of everything Kelvin Sampson has built.
It took every ounce of his accrued experience and his players’ competitive zeal to beat Duke on Saturday night, but it was enough. Now the Cougars will play the Florida Gators for a long-denied national championship Monday night. Houston culture is on the doorstep of final validation.