San Antonio (AP) – All that Kelvin Sampson could do was there was the hand on the hips with an empty look at his face, while the ball bounced and Houston’s last chance in a national title has also rebounded.
The coach who ordered all the details during a 36-year career of victories, losses and a few Final Fours did nothing for this one. The last second error ended with a 65-63 Loss In Florida Monday evening.
It took the 69 -year -old coach for years to transform Houston into one of the best university basketball programs – a built on defense, tenacity, rebound and do things in a difficult and hard way. Sampson has also rehabilitated its image, the pariah who nobody understood to become a Béacon for how to connect with players and do things in the “good” way.
But there was no escape from anxiety this time, to waste a 12-point lead in the second half to this final turnover which sent Sampson in the off-season trapped on victory n ° 799 in a career through the path.
“There will always be opponents and negative nodles and all that, but this is where your faith and family are much more important than anything that is,” said Sampson outside the Houston changing rooms in Alamodom. “And protecting these children, I care about protecting them more at the moment to make sure they know what a great year they had. What a brilliant, brilliant and brilliant year they had.”
The game ended with Houston (35-5) – which Finished at n ° 2 in the last survey after top 25 Tuesday – Impossible even to get up on his last two property, a fact that Sampson called “incomprehensible”. On one, Emanuel Sharp led the right side but made sure that the ball stripped it and lost it out of the limits with 26.6 seconds and Houston below.
A few moments later, Houston had his second chance to move forward. The ball went to Sharp again, who tried to shoot a 3 -point on the catch only to see a hard closure of the Florida star, Walter Clayton Jr., to come.
Stuck in the air, he tried to dribble the ball to avoid turnover and was forced to let it bounce, the ballooning the ground with about 4.5 seconds to play, then continuing to bounce for more than 2 precious seconds. Finally, Alex Condon of Florida plunged for the ball, sending Ja’Vier Francis de Houston to the ground and killing the last moments of the dream of the cougars.
A few moments later, when the confetti began to fall in love with Gators, Sampson walked with their heads to the edge of the courtyard as if he was trying to give meaning to what had just happened. He went down the steps, then started getting on the track through the heaviest concentration of Houston fans dressed in red in a painful walk in the locker room.
“I wanted him so much for him,” said the great Houston man, I Wan Roberts, who played five seasons for Sampson after a year of red shirt. “So, so badly. And it hurts. Sampson coach, the role he played in my life, I can’t even put into words.”
It was almost the culmination of a career that began as a graduate assistant from the State of Michigan under Jud Heathcote. His way crossed Washington’s state, Oklahoma – where he guided the Sooners to the 2002 Final – and Indiana before his career, there was a gap due to a NCAA investigation and triggered this successful second act.
Along the way, The double national coach of the year associated with the Associated Press Rolled up with the rapidly evolving university landscape. Players can move freely in the transfer portal and take advantage of their athletic fame thanks to the use of their name, image and resemblance (Nile).
“In his mind, he’s like,” look, I’m going to manage everything that is told “,” said Houston sports director Eddie Nuñez. “More impressive than anything else for me, it is to see it and how incredible it was by being agile and understanding how to evolve. Everyone says he’s from the old school, but the reality is, he obtains it and surrounds himself with his son and other people who can help him with null, income sharing. Whatever, we will. “
And yet Sampson has always spoken in the Final Four in a way in accordance with his first days as a coach to Tiny Montana Tech.
“I love to train basketball, I love to teach,” said Sampson. “I don’t know where I would have been good if I had not been a coach because it is the only thing I have ever been. But I think I would have liked to be a teacher too, because I like to teach things and see the children learn and apply it, I have success. I choose to focus on these things that the portal. ”
Raised from the IU due to an NCAA survey on Sampson making too many recruitment phone calls, he received a penalty of five years of presentation in 2008 which held him out of the ranks of the college until his return to Houston in 2014.
Sampson found refuge there after having passed his exile in the NBA, while he offered the school the dream to reconnect with his history linked to the famous era of Phi Slama Jama in the 1980s – which before this year had marked the two trips of the program in the match for the title of the NCAA – behind a coach with a proven record for victory.
In his third season, Sampson had cougars in March Madness. They won 33 games in his fourth, then two years later Return cougars in the Final Four in 2021 – The first program since Hakeem Olajuwon and coach Guy Lewis led them to the match for the title of 1984 before falling to Patrick Ewing and Georgetown.
The Indianapolis bubble four years ago eliminated any doubt about the arrival of Houston as a national power. Everything is rooted in the vision of Sampson, built in his image by demanding an inflexible struggle and a work ethics to return to his education in the eastern Carolina of the North.
His team had presented this all season, more recently with an improbable return in the last minute To darken Duke in the national semi-finals on Saturday. Then came the final on Monday evening, leading almost the way and keeping Clayton under control after the Gators star has torn March Madness.
The cougars could simply not finish a night when they pulled only 34.8%, including 6 out of 25 from the 3 -point range, which has too much weight on the defense to bring them home.
“I’m just proud of how we fought all season,” said the top scorer LJ Cryer.
And at the end, Sampson could not find the answer. Instead, he spent an additional 20 minutes after his post-match press conference to talk to the whole with journalists, an unusual show for the coach losing the last Monday evening of the season.
“Disappointing,” he said. “But we did not lose in the first round. We did not lose in the CBI. We lost in the national championship match, to the best team of the dry. We fought them until the end, and I am proud of my team.”
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This story was corrected to show that Houston had twice the match for the NCAA title, not once.
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The national writer AP Eddie Palls contributed to this report.
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