With a new arena and a national coach of the year candidate on the bench, Houston basketball is stirring memories of its glory days of the early 1980s
by Dick Weiss
Kelvin Sampson of the University of Houston is rapidly becoming a popular choice for national Coach of the Year.
Sampson has coached the Cougars to a 26-1 record and a No. 8 spot in the weekly AP poll. Houston has become a feel-good story, to the point where ESPN is bringing its weekly College GameDay program to the state of the art Fertitta Center Saturday in advance of the afternoon’s nationally televised game against preseason favorite UCF.
All of this is good news for the American Athletic Conference, which has a team in the national top 10 for the second straight season and the third time in four years.
After previous head coaching stops at four universities, Sampson had most recently served as an assistant with the NBA Milwaukee Bucks and Houston Rockets before Houston, looking for a flashy hire and a proven winner, hired him to in the spring of 2014.
Sampson could always coach. He was born and raised in North Carolina and was a college star in basketball and baseball at Pembroke State. He took a job after graduation as a graduate assistant with Jed Heathcote in 1980, the season after Magic Johnson left Michigan State following a national championship, and worked his way up the coaching ladder. His first head coaching job was at Montana Tech. After going 7-20 his first year, he coached them to three straight 22-win seasons and two Pioneer Conference titles.
Sampson left after five years, jumping to the world of Division I basketball. He was an assistant at Washington State for two years, before being named the head coach. When Sampson led the Cougars to the 1992 NIT, it was the first time that Washington State had been to postseason play since 1983. Two years later, he coached them to their first NCAA appearance in 11 years before leaving for Oklahoma.
In his first year with the Sooners, Sampson was named national coach of the year after leading the Big 12 program to an undefeated record at home and a 23-9 record overall. He coached Oklahoma to 11 NCAA tournaments in 12 years, including the 2002 Final Four and an Elite Eight in 2003; and 43 wins and another tournament appearance in the two years at Indiana.
Sampson has managed to reinvent himself by rejuvenating Houston, a one-time national power that reached four Final Fours in 1968, 1982, 1983 and 1984 under Hall of Fame coach Guy V. Lewis when Naismith Hall of Fame players Elvin Hayes, Clyde Drexler and Hakeem Olajuwon were among the biggest names in college basketball.
When Sampson arrived in Houston, the Cougars had made one lone NCAA appearance (in 2010) since 1992. Sampson took them to the NIT in his second and third years before the Cougars exploded onto the national scene in 2018, barging into the top 25 and winning 27 games. Houston won its first NCAA tournament game since 1984, advancing to the round of 32 before falling in a heartbreaker to Michigan, 64-63, on a desperation three-pointer as time expired.
It was not lost on Houston fans that the Michigan team that escaped with the win against the Cougars went on to play in the championship game of the Final Four. No one knows how high the ceiling is this year.
Sampson has been instrumental for Houston’s push to raise funds to build a $25 million practice facility in 2016 and a $60 million arena that opened this year, but the road to redemption has not always been easy. Sampson had to deal with the devastation from Hurricane Harvey that left large parts of the city and under water. And his original home court, Hofheinz Pavilion, was aging badly to a point where strong rains would leak through the ceiling and onto the court. Last year, during the renovation to turn Hofheinz into a sparking new arena, Houston had to practiced and played its home games in at nearby Texas Southern.
But Sampson never gave into the obstacles. Attendance, which had been dwindling at the dated Hofheinz Pavilion, is catching fire in the sparkling Fertitta Center. Advance sellouts are now the norm and local and national celebrities dot the courtside seats to watch this team, which does not have any real household names, make the top 10 for the first time since the Phi Slama Jama era.
The Cougars, who lead the American with a 13-1 record and are listed as a No. 3 seed in most mock NCAA brackets, won their 11th straight game Saturday and their 33rd straight home game, defeating USF, 71-59, as DeJon Jarreau exploded for 17 points and Corey Davis Jr. added 15. Davis, a first team junior college All-American from San Jacinto Junior College, chose Houston over Arizona, Oklahoma and LSU and is the closest thing Houston had to a big profile player. He is originally from Lafayette, La., and came to Houston with a reputation as a long-range shooter. He had 103 3-pointers as a junior and has been on fire from beyond the arc lately. Davis had four threes against USF to go with the eight more he made during an 83-50 win over Tulane a week ago in New Orleans.
The Cougars, who shot 48 percent against USF, broke open a close game, taking a 34-26 lead with a 10-3 run to end the half, then scored the first seven points of the second half. Houston limited the Bulls to 31-percent shooting with its suffocating half-court, man-to-man defense.
“That’s as good a defensive team as there is in the country,” said USF coach Brian Gregory, himself a bona fide coach-of-the-year candidate for the rebuild he has done in Tampa this season. “Not only are they really solid defensively, but they’ve got multiple bodies they can throw at you.”
The Cougars are ranked second nationally in field-goal percentage defense (.362), third in three-point defense (.273) and fifth in scoring defense (60.3). Opponents have been held below 40-percent shooting 20 times.
“That's a recurring theme with coach Sampson,” Davis said. “He lets us know that we're not going to win games if we're not focused on defense.”
In order to reinvent himself, Sampson had to reinvent a once-proud program. Now, he can think about a bright future at a program he has brought back into the spotlight.