The Cougars took down Illinois with their toughness, grit and defense. That’s exactly how their coach likes it.
PITTSBURGH, Penn. — Have you ever seen a Kelvin Sampson-run practice?
They are legendary for their intensity. They are fast, and they are fierce. They can be downright nasty, in fact. Sampson compares some of them to a raging thunderstorm. At times, they’re more like a “tsunami,” he says.
Loose ball drills soaked in sweat. Bodies banging. Sneakers squeaking.
These are the practices of a grinder, a man who admittedly held an inferiority complex as a young head coach in the Pac-12. It is a condition, he now says, that birthed the coach you see today, the one standing in a dimly lit hallway of the PPG Paints Arena having led the Houston Cougars to a third straight Sweet 16.
Teams emulate their coach, and boy does this one. On Sunday afternoon against Big Ten regular-season champion Illinois, the No. 5 seed Cougars showed an entire nation the Houston Hustle. This romping 68–53 victory felt like a rock fight in the middle of the street between two neighborhood rivals. While Illinois possessed the bigger rock—7-foot, 285-pound beast of a center Kofi Cockburn—Houston’s weapons were hardened through weeks of intense grind.
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“The story of this game is our toughness, how hard we play and the defense,” Sampson said afterward.
Toughness? Yes, Houston had 15 offensive rebounds and, overall, out-rebounded a bigger opponent by six boards.
How hard do they play? One of their players, Taze Moore, crashed into press row while tracking down a loose ball (turns out, Taze is quite the gentleman—he assisted columnist David Jones, knocked over during the play, up from the floor). Another one of Sampson’s guys, Fabian White Jr., nearly took out more reporters in a miraculous save of another loose ball, swatting it back in play for a crucial late-game layup that awed social media.
Defense, you say? Houston had eight steals, forced 17 turnovers and blocked six shots. The Cougars (31–5) limited the big man, Cockburn, to six points in the first half before withstanding 13 more from him in the second.
With about seven minutes left in the game, Houston blocked two shots within two seconds to force a shot-clock violation. The Cougars’ bench roared, Sampson gave a fist bump and Houston slammed the door shut on any possible comeback from the Illini (23–10). It keeps hopes alive for a consecutive trip to the Final Four.
The faces of 2022 Houston are much different than those of the 2021 team that marched to the semifinals while inside the bubble in Indianapolis last March. However, they play the same game: the nasty defense, the fierce rebounding, the wild loose-ball sprints.
They throw their bodies around without a care. Why? “It’s our heart,” says Jamal Shead, the team’s point guard. “We don’t want to lose.”
Shead, a 19-year-old sophomore, is normally the playmaker of this group, running point and setting up the shots. On Sunday, he scored 18, burying key shots late in the game. Moore is this team’s 6’6”, do-it-all swing player. And along with his press-row crash, he scored a game-high 21 and had seven boards.
Moore, a sixth-year player from Mississippi, has made massive leaps in his development since the summer. Sampson described his game then as being “a fart in a skillet.”
Seven months later, there’s no fart—just skillet.
“My teammates encouraged me to be the tough, gritty guy that I am,” Moore said. Tough and gritty? That’s the team in a nutshell—kind of like its coach.
The 67-year-old Sampson was born into a Native American community in North Carolina and began his head coaching career as a 25-year-old on the lowest collegiate rung, at NAIA Montana Tech. The Orediggers won zero conference games his first season before winning the league in Year 3.
He then moved to Washington State, where he sat at the bottom of a Pac-12 conference full of Hall of Famers.
“I’m just an old NAIA guy from North Carolina that got some jobs early when he was young,” he says. “I probably had a little bit of an inferiority complex. I coached in the league with older guys and I felt like I wasn’t as good as them. The only way I felt to even the playing field was just work harder than them.
“I was 31 years old as a head coach against Lute Olson and Mike Montgomery. I didn’t think I belonged.”
He smiles thinking about it. “What drove me?” he asks. “I wanted to belong.”
In his eighth year in Houston, he’s revived the program as well as his coaching career, once tarnished in NCAA scandal. He’s made the Cougars a Group of 5 power, attractive enough to get an invitation into the Big 12 (they’ll start play there as soon as 2023).
He belongs now, no? He’s the old guy, the veteran, the Lute Olson of the American, the Mike Montgomery of the Group of 5.
“Naaaah,” Sampson mutters. “I’m still that guy at Montana Tech.”
And what awaits at Houston practice on Monday? A tsunami.
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