Inside the epic Final Four rally Houston basketball was built for: Belief, grit, trust, luck

SAN ANTONIO — Lauren Sampson watched the last four minutes of one of the greatest comebacks in Final Four history in a seated fetal position, with her head down and her eyes on her phone, swiping through dogs on petfinder.com. The daughter of Houston coach Kelvin Sampson told her mom she was going to need something soothing to return home to. She put in applications for nine pups.

The Sampsons are used to heartbreak in this tournament, and Lauren figured more was coming. Kelvin Sampson has built his program to a level where the Cougars are good enough every year to have a chance to play on the season’s final Monday night, but something has always broken wrong. A year ago, star Jamal Shead sprained his ankle in the Sweet 16 against Duke, and Houston lost its mojo. The year before that, injuries to starting guards Marcus Sasser and Shead were too much to overcome. The year before that, a shorthanded team — because of, you guessed it, injuries — had a nightmarish shooting night in the Elite Eight against Villanova.

The Cougars entered this NCAA Tournament healthy, but most expected this fun run to end on Saturday in the Final Four. One final reminder came on Saturday afternoon, when the Sampsons gathered to watch a story on ESPN about their family, then watched afterward as the analysts all picked Duke to win.

“I don’t know how they’re going to do it,” Lauren Sampson said was the analysts’ message. “Their length. Apparently (Cooper Flagg is) Larry Bird.”

Lauren looked over at her father. He shrugged.

Throughout this run, Kelvin Sampson has believed this team, at full strength, was going to be the one that could finally flip the script. And on cue, the Cougars turned into the team of destiny in a 70-67 win to send home Duke, the best collection of talent in college basketball.

The Cougars started to believe anything was possible after pulling off the most miraculous win of the season on Jan. 25 at Allen Fieldhouse. They trailed by six with 18.3 seconds left in overtime and Kansas point guard Dajuan Harris heading to the free throw line in the double bonus with a chance to end it. In the first 72 home games of his KU career, Harris had missed both free throws of a two-shot foul opportunity just one time. The Cougars had a 0.4 percent win probability. Harris missed both, and the Cougars scored six points in the next 14 seconds to force a second overtime. Sampson won in Lawrence for the first time in his career.

That afternoon, Karen Sampson spent both overtimes walking the concourse, because she was convinced the outcome would go the other way. She knew better than to look away on Saturday night, even when Houston trailed by 14 with just over eight minutes left, or when with just over a minute left, center Joseph Tugler reached across the baseline and knocked the ball out of Duke inbounder Sion James’ hands, drawing a technical foul and prompting a free throw that pushed Duke’s lead to six.

“This could be the first brick towards disbelief,” Sampson told his team in that moment. “Don’t let it be.”

It was still a two-possession game, and the statistical play would have been to lengthen the game by fouling. Sampson told his team to keep trusting its defense, which is the best in the country for a reason.

“They were waiting on us to foul,” UH assistant and head-coach-in-waiting Kellen Sampson said, “and we didn’t foul.”

Instead, Tugler was switched onto Duke’s Kon Knueppel late in the shot clock, and Knueppel drove to the basket, jump-stopping and trying to get Tugler into the air to draw a foul. Tugler stayed down, then blocked Knueppel’s shot.

Junior guard Emanuel Sharp, who buried the first 3 to keep hope alive in that comeback at Kansas, had a shot to do it again after the Cougars raced back down the court. Sharp set a ghost screen for Milos Uzan and broke free for a second from Flagg, who recovers defensively about as fast as any player in the country. Sharp gave a subtle shot fake, side-stepped and buried another must-have triple.

On the ensuing inbounds pass, it was time to let the 6-8 Tugler wreak havoc again.

“Jo’s a terror on the ball,” Kellen Sampson said. “And it was one of the things we kept saying. Look, we’ve got the best trapping big in America, and we can create some chaos.”

The other secret weapon in that full-court press: fifth-year guard Mylik Wilson. During the timeout after Sharp’s 3, Houston reinserted Wilson because he’s the best off-ball defender in the press. “I don’t know if you’ve ever been to (Wilson’s hometown) Rayville, La., but they don’t exactly do shell drill,” Kellen said. “They press.”

After Sharp forced Duke into a stationary throw-in by knocking the first pass attempt out of bounds, James tried to float a pass to Flagg and Wilson knocked it away, the ball ping-ponging back to Sharp, who passed to Wilson to see if the script could play out just as it did at Kansas when he hit a post-steal 3 to force double overtime. Wilson missed this time, but Tugler was there for the putback dunk with 25.5 seconds left, putting Houston down by one.

The Cougars finally had to foul, sending Duke’s Tyrese Proctor to the free-throw line. The Sampsons were convinced they could win this week if they forced Duke to feel some game pressure. Since the start of December, Duke had been in just one one-possession game, as the Blue Devils cruised through the ACC and got used to winning by double-digits.

“Big 12 got us right,” Kellen Sampson said. “Two games a week, ten weeks. How many tough, gritty, close games? Our situational basketball was built by the 12.”

With the pressure on, Proctor missed the front end of the one-and-one, and Flagg was called for an over-the-back foul, sending senior forward J’Wan Roberts to the line with 19.6 seconds left.

A year ago, Kelvin Sampson had realized the truth when he rewatched the Sweet 16 loss to Duke: The Shead injury hurt, but Houston lost the game at the free-throw line, hitting just 9 of 17 free throws that night in a three-point loss. Roberts went 3 for 8 from the stripe. In June, Sampson put in a new program initiative: Every Houston player would make 150 free throws every day.

The Cougars have improved at the line this year by 5.5 percent — “That’s why he’s a Hall of Famer,” Kellen said of his father — but early in the season, Roberts wasn’t seeing the work pay off. The sixth-year forward had key misses in the final minute of regulation losses to Alabama and San Diego State at the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas, two free throws that could have won the Cougars the game in regulation and instead led to overtime losses. In the three days between the win over Kansas and the next game at West Virginia, Roberts made a change to his routine. On his right wrist is a tattoo of Roberts’ hand holding his father’s; he now kisses that wrist before every free throw.

At that point in the season, Roberts was shooting 55 percent at the line; since that change, he has shot 69 percent. When Sampson walked into his office on Wednesday morning, there was a piece of paper slipped under his door documenting that Roberts had made another 150 the night before.

“You prepare for moments like this when everybody’s watching in those moments when nobody is,” Sampson said.

Roberts confidently walked to the line and told himself, “Trust your work.” He kissed his wrist, buried the first, then put his palms toward the ground signaling for everyone to stay calm. On the second one, another kiss, another connection.

“I wasn’t even nervous,” he said after. “For real.”

With Houston now ahead by one, Duke coach Jon Scheyer called timeout to draw up a play. In the Houston huddle, Roberts told his coaches that he didn’t want any help against Flagg. In the first half, Roberts had kept his body in front of Flagg several times, only to have the help defender behind him cheat up toward Flagg and the freshman star burn the Cougars by finding the open man. The Coogs decided at halftime to live with playing Flagg one-on-one, especially if it was Roberts.

“I knew where the ball was going to,” Roberts said. “I mean, there’s only one person who had the ball in their hands; it’s the player of the year. So you’re not gonna stop him from shooting the ball, but you can make it as difficult as you can.”

That’s what Roberts did, forcing Flagg to spin in the middle of the lane and try a contested turnaround that missed. Wilson rebounded, and the ball ended up in fifth-year guard L.J. Cryer’s hands for the free throws that put Houston ahead by three and made it so that overtime was the worst-case scenario.

The comeback was miraculous, but the odds were a bit better than they were two months ago in Lawrence; Houston’s minimum win probability on Saturday, according to KenPom.com, was 2.5 percent.

“We’ve had some bad luck here in March the last three years,” Kellen Sampson said. “We took all of that bad luck and we put it into one, and this is what we got.”

Afterward, Lauren Sampson was still nervous. Not about the game, but what she might have done. Five years ago, in a similar situation, she’d ended up with a Chihuahua mix named Lady. But nine?

“You may have to take a couple,” she told her mom.

A suggestion: If the Cougars win on Monday night, one of those mutts better be named J’Wan.

(Photo: Jamie Squire / Getty Images)

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