SAN ANTONIO – It’s Florida vs. Houston. It’s offense vs. defense. It is young vs. old, at least when it comes to the guys calling the shots.
Begin with a Kelvin Sampson story. He has told a lot of them this week at the Final Four. This was in the 1980s and his first head coaching job at Montana Tech, hired on a recommendation from his old boss, Michigan State’s Jud Heathcote.
🏆 CHAMP PREVIEW: Florida awaits Houston
“They named me the head coach, but they never had a winning season. Everybody there that played, every student, was an engineer. I could never have gotten into school there, and I’m coaching those guys in basketball. I think every curriculum required 30 credits of math, metallurgical engineering, petroleum engineering, mining engineering. They hired me as their basketball coach because it was not important. If it had been important, they would never have hired me.
“Sometimes we’d only have seven on a road trip, which meant we didn’t have to take a bus, we would just go to motor pool, they’d give me the keys to the van. No credit cards, I’d have enough money to go fill it. They knew how far the trip was, so they gave me enough money to get gas.
“I felt bad for our kids at Montana Tech because they had to have me as their coach. Our first year we went 4-22 (actually 7-20). Jud Heathcote called me up that Monday, season ended on Saturday. My phone rang. `Hey, Kel, I just want to congratulate you. You’re the only coach in captivity that possibly could have taken Montana Tech from obscurity to oblivion. Got to go, Kel.’
“True story.”
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Three years later, Montana Tech was 22-7 and Sampson would be on his way to Washington State, his career taking flight. It was 1985. Far off in Arizona, Todd Golden was being born.
It’s four decades later. “I’m so old,” Sampson said. “I remember when seasons started after Thanksgiving. Now you may have five guys transfer by Thanksgiving.” Their roads have converged here, for the 67th and last game of this 2025 NCAA Tournament. A lot of things could be decided Monday night in the Alamodome, not just a national championship.
Houston could become the 38th school to win a title, finally coming concluding its national championship quest after six decades of dead ends.
Florida could cap a historic SEC season with a confetti shower. Does the SEC need a trophy to validate its claim as possibly the strongest conference of all time? Depends on who you ask. But remember, it has been 13 years since a league member was the last team standing.
Houston could become the first team in a half-century to win the title in its home state, going back to UCLA in San Diego in 1975. Though Kansas came close in 1988, getting crowned just across the Missouri River in Kansas City,
Florida’s Walter Clayton Jr., already one of the faces of the tournament, could secure his legend as Mr. March (and April). His 34 points against Auburn, to go with the 30 last week against Texas Tech, made him the first player with 30-30 games in the Elite Eight and Final Four since Larry Bird. Rarified air. He is averaging 24.6 points a game in Florida’s NCAA Tournament run.
LATE-GAME WALTER CLAYTON HAS ARRIVED 🎯#MarchMadness @GatorsMBK pic.twitter.com/4jsADtBYTT
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) April 6, 2025
But he understands that when Houston hones its defensive plans these last hours, his is the name that gets mentioned most. “I wouldn’t say it worries me,” he said. “But obviously it’s going to be a 40-minute dogfight.” Houston’s L.J. Cryer, who kept the Cougars afloat against Duke, could become the first man to play for two different national championship programs. It counts with Baylor in 2021, even though he was on the court for only three minutes in the Final Four and missed both shots.
Then there are the two coaches, born 30 years apart and with different styles and ways of winning.
Golden started his playing days at Saint Mary’s as a walk-on, worked a while later in advertising sales, made himself marketable with a successful coaching run at San Francisco, and had never won an NCAA Tournament game in his life until three weeks ago. “Probably happened a little faster than some people thought it might,” he said of his express lane career trajectory. “But we’re here now and we’re 40 minutes away from being national champs. We have to beat an incredibly difficult team on Monday night, but we’re in the arena. At this point, it’s all I can ask for.” He is 39 years old, a native son of Phoenix and lives in the world of metrics. He will go after Houston with his computers as well as his Gators.
“We’re very analytical in everything we do. We talk about that a lot, whether it’s roster building, whether it’s scheduling, deciding who I want to play, game scouting reports, et cetera,” he said. “The way I like to explain it, a macro outlook on our decision-making and how we build out. Then we got to live with the consequences. It’s not always going to work. Life is not perfect.”
Sampson is 69, and should his Cougars win Monday night, he’d be the oldest championship coach in history. Also, the first who started in a place such as the Lumbee Native American community in North Carolina. Maybe the stars are aligned now for Houston. Or maybe this is just the right team, the product of a relentless building program by Sampson who – in case anyone hasn’t noticed – is 160-23 the past five seasons.
COACH SAMPSON SLAPS HOUSTON’S NAME ON TO THE #NATIONALCHAMPIONSHIP 😤@UHCougarMBK LOCKER ROOM IS LIT 🗣️#MarchMadness pic.twitter.com/3yWqhKsRLy
— NCAA March Madness (@MarchMadnessMBB) April 6, 2025
Sunday, Championship Eve, seemed a proper time to reflect on what all that could mean.
“I’m not very good at that stuff,” he said. “My mother always used to tell me that I had to learn to smell the roses. My mother passed away in 2014. I never did learn.”
But he did have another story or two.
“When you’re pressing 70, you look at things a lot differently. I mean, you’re grown up now. You’re 70. I’ve spent a little time this morning with my grandkids. First time I went to the Final Four in 2002, my son was on the team, or he was on the bench with us. Over the years, things kind of come full circle in some ways.
“Last night I got so many texts. I haven’t returned any. There’s too many to even look at. I didn’t even get through all of them. I saw Tubby (Smith) and Rick Barnes, Tom Izzo, Pop (Gregg Popovich), a bunch of the older coaches. They all kind of had similar messages to me. Win one for the old guys, something like that. We were all young at the same time coming up.
“I used to come to the tournament when I was a young coach, I would sit in those stands and look at the two coaches in the championship game. You think you’d like to be there one day, if you could ever get a chance. So for me, it’s a lot of gratitude, a lot of appreciation for having this opportunity. But you owe it to so many people. You don’t do things like this in a vacuum. I got a great team, a great staff. I’m able to work independent of everything. I run the program without any resistance. I make all the decisions, with my staff, of course. We’ve kind of done it our way. It’s worked out pretty good.”
His team has been built with a steely purpose. Play Houston basketball, or else.
“First I had to surrender to the culture,” Cryer said of his transfer. “You can’t come in with your own agenda.”
J’Wan Roberts has been a Cougar for six seasons so he should know what Sampson Ball is as well as anyone, with its non-negotiable demands for constant all-out effort. “It’s extremely hard to play for the University of Houston,” he said. “I don’t think there’s one possession where we don’t play hard.”
Sampson craves active and willing defenders with a lot of length, so one of the first things he does when a recruit visits campus is measure wingspan. That goes on the wingspan wall where the length of another Houston Cougar from long ago is on display. Hakeem Olajuwon. He could stretch from El Paso to Texarkana.
“We don’t have a lot of signs in our building. I don’t know what those signs mean anyway,” Sampson said. “There’s one sign that you’ll see a lot in our building. It just says ‘culture’. How you do anything is how you do everything, right? Being on time, treating people with respect, having the right attitude every day, giving great effort every day in whatever it is you’re asked to do. Our kids are pretty good at that.”
Clearly, each coach has pushed the right buttons. Golden might have his analytics but he can also get down to basketball basics, such as the need to use muscle inside, and the consequence if a player doesn’t.
“The way our guys understand, if they’re not physical, if they don’t rebound, there are a couple guys behind them that are on the bench that are going to be willing to do it,” he said.
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The numbers suggest to him what his team is in for Monday night.
“We’re an elite offensive team, a top 10 defensive team. They’re a top 10 offensive team and elite defensive team,” Golden said. “I think it’s going to be a contrasting battle that way. Hopefully, we can get the game up and down a little bit. They’re going to impose their will as they’ve done on everybody this year. We’re a pretty tough team also.”
He knows what state this is and Monday might be like a road game. But the potential payoff is vast. Besides, they won the SEC tournament against Tennessee in Nashville.
“It’s just part of what you have to get through to win a national championship. For us, it allows us to add another chip on our shoulder and try to prove that we belong and that we can win in another hostile environment. It will be a bigger challenge because of that. It’s nothing that we haven’t seen before this year.
“For us to continue to put ourselves on the map and continue to get Florida basketball where we want it to be, tomorrow night is a great opportunity. We got 40 minutes for one chance to win a national championship, continue to put ourselves in that conversation.”
He’s not yet 40 so there may be other chances. Sampson? Who’s to know? But he has his life’s work to look back on Monday night, if he has the time.
“It’s hard for me to think about the journey without thinking of my mother and father. My mother was a nurse. She worked 12-hour shifts. Her shift was either 8 to 8 or 7 to 7. My dad was a high school basketball coach in a little country community, Magnolia High School. I’m not even sure if I would know how to get to that. I had a twin sister, younger sister, and an older sister. My twin sister passed away a couple years ago, so . . . “
That’s when the tough-minded coach of a tough-minded team had to pause, take a sip of water and fight tears.
He wants this badly, six months before he hits 70. So does the kid on the other bench, because nobody is guaranteed to ever get back, even when you’re 39. They are different men united by their sense of urgency, as two college basketball coaches always are on the first Monday night in April.
