By any measure, the University of Houston’s men’s basketball program has been among the best and most consistent in the nation. Still, until recently, the Cougars dominated in the American Athletic Conference, which ranks a tier or two below the major leagues. When Houston joined the Big 12 last season, most expected the Cougars to have a tougher time against a much more difficult schedule.
That has not come to fruition. Rather, Houston continues to run through its league regardless of the higher level of competition.
The Cougars improved to 23-4 overall and 15-1 in the Big 12 following Saturday’s 68-59 home victory over Iowa State in front of the 31st consecutive sellout crowd at the on-campus Fertitta Center. With four regular season games remaining, they are on track to win their second consecutive Big 12 championship, as they have a comfortable three-game lead over Texas Tech and Arizona, both 12-4 in the league. Houston visits Texas Tech Monday night.
The Cougars are ranked fifth in the Associated Press poll and could earn a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament for the third consecutive season, something that seemed impossible when Sampson arrived in 2014.
Back then, Houston had made the NCAA tournament just once in the previous 21 seasons and hadn’t won an NCAA game since losing in the championship game in 1984, the last of three consecutive Final Fours. More than that, they were irrelevant in a city that had an NBA, NFL and Major League Baseball franchise and in a state that had top college programs such as the University of Texas and Texas A&M.
Sampson hadn’t coached in college since February 2008 when he resigned under pressure as Indiana University’s coach for making impermissible phone calls to recruits, a penalty that in hindsight seems trivial but at the time was considered serious. The NCAA imposed a five-year show-cause penalty against Sampson, so he headed to the NBA, where he was an assistant for the Milwaukee Bucks and Houston Rockets.
After Houston fired coach James Dickey 11 years ago, athletics director Mack Rhoades reached out to and ultimately hired Sampson, who had made the NCAA tournament 13 times in 14 combined seasons at Oklahoma and Indiana. Still, it took some time for Sampson to turn things around at Houston. During his first season in 2014-15, the Cougars finished 13-19 and 10th out of 11 teams in the AAC. They averaged only 2,635 fans per home game.
“We had to take what people thought of Houston basketball and completely change it,” Lauren Sampson, the coach’s daughter and Houston’s director for basketball operations, told me in an interview in 2021. “We had to go, ‘We understand what you thought, but that’s not who we are.’ From a brand level, I needed to flip the script.”
Sampson began spending more time in the community, while Lauren worked on social media outreach and adopting a #ForTheCity slogan that eventually caught on. And the school made upgrades to the game-day atmosphere.
What really changed things, though, was the winning. Houston made the NCAA tournament for the first time under Sampson in 2018, and the Cougars haven’t missed the event since, save for 2020 when the tournament was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Starting in the 2018-19 season, the Cougars won four AAC regular season titles in five seasons, the lone exception occurring in 2021 when Houston finished second, won the conference tournament championship and made the NCAA tournament’s Final Four. But the AAC was only ranked between the sixth- and eighth-best conference during those seasons, per analyst Ken Pomeroy. The Big 12, meanwhile, was first in three of those seasons and second in the other two.
Still, Houston kept on rolling last season, its first in the Big 12, finishing first with a 15-3 league record, two games ahead of second-place Iowa State. The Cougars received the No. 1 seed in the NCAA’s South Region. During the first half of a Sweet 16 game against Duke, Houston point guard Jamal Shead injured his ankle and never returned. Without Shead, a first-team All-American and Big 12 Player of the Year, the Cougars lost, 54-51, ending their season.
While Shead graduated, Houston has three of its top scorers back from last season in senior guard LJ Cryer, junior guard Emanuel Sharp and senior forward J’Wan Roberts, all of whom are in the starting lineup. Cryer leads the team with 15 points per game, while Sharp and Roberts are next at 12.0 and 11.3 points per game, respectively.
Junior guard Milos Uzan, a transfer from Oklahoma who is averaging 10.7 points and 4.7 assists per game, and sophomore forward Joseph Tugler, who is averaging 5.7 points and 5.8 rebounds per game, are the other starters. The top three reserves are junior guard Terrance Arceneaux (8.1 points per game), senior guard Mylik Wilson (6.0 points) and senior forward Ja’Vier Francis (5.1 points and 4.2 rebounds). Sampson signed Arceneaux and Francis out of high school, while Wilson is in his second season with the Cougars after transferring from Texas Tech.
Houston was fourth in the preseason Associated Press poll but lost three of its first seven games and fell to No. 17 in early December. Since then, the Cougars have gone 19-1, with the lone loss occurring on Feb. 1 when Texas Tech won, 82-81, in overtime.
Houston is looking to avenge that loss Monday night when it travels to play Texas Tech. The Red Raiders (21-6) are No. 9 in the AP poll and have lost only two home games this season. Meanwhile, the Cougars are undefeated on the road, with three of their four losses coming on neutral sites and other at home. Houston has lost three games in overtime, while the other loss was 74-69 in the second game of the season against Auburn, which is now No. 1 in the AP poll.
Houston is No. 3 in KenPom’s rating as well as the NCAA’s NET ranking. While the Cougars are known for their defense and rank first in the nation with 57.7 points allowed per game and third in KenPom’s adjusted defensive efficiency metric, they are also effective on the other end of the floor even though they play at a slow pace. They are third-to-last in the nation in KenPom’s adjusted tempo, meaning the number of possessions per 40 minutes adjusted for opponent, but they are still No. 3 with an adjusted offensive rating of 125.0, which is by far the program’s best since KenPom began tracking the stat in 1997.
With Sampson at the helm, the program is at its best point since the mid-1980s when Houston had two future Hall of Famers in Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler. These Cougars of the past decade do not have the same high-end talent as those teams from 40 years. Only three players since Sampson arrived have been first round NBA draft picks. Still, Sampson has had the Cougars dominating for a longer stretch than the Houston teams in the 1980s, and he has excelled with various players and lineups over the years. Once again, Houston enters March with a legitimate shot at making the Final Four and even winning the school’s first national title.
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