In the spring and summer of 2023, Houston head coach Kelvin Sampson had big decisions to make. He had a job offer — he will not say where — that prompted a family huddle over 72 hours and ended with Sampson receiving a new contract featuring a raise and a formalized succession plan to name his son Kellen head-coach-in-waiting. And the Cougars’ impending conference transition from the American to the Big 12 forced a question: Did Houston have enough to compete, or did Sampson need to hit the transfer portal?
While the rest of the league and much of college basketball has leaned heavily on the portal, Sampson has added just one player in the portal each of the last two years.
“I bet on our garden,” Sampson told The Athletic late Monday night on a bus ride to the Lubbock airport after a 69-61 win over No. 10 Texas Tech, which secured Houston at least a share of a second straight Big 12 title. “I bet on our ability to till the dirt, plant the seeds and go get it and prepare it, cook it and serve it and eat it. And these guys, our players, prefer it that way.”
It’s a utopian approach in this era: Put in the work, and your turn will come.
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Sampson’s latest achievement is yet another reason to reorganize his biography and push what was once a defining moment down to the footnotes. Sampson was temporarily exiled from college basketball after resigning from Indiana under NCAA scrutiny for violations of a rule (impermissible phone calls to recruits) that has since been removed from the rule books. He left for the NBA, received a five-year show-cause penalty and wasn’t sure if he’d ever return.
At Houston, Sampson got the opportunity to take over a program he could mold however he saw fit. Cougars basketball had mostly been forgotten, a relic from the past leaning on the bygone eras of Phi Slama Jama and Elvin Hayes. Before hiring Sampson, the program hadn’t won an NCAA Tournament game since 1984.
Sampson convinced Houston to invest in basketball — new practice facility, renovated arena — and his ensuing success, along with the football program’s rise, helped Houston secure the invite to the Big 12.
The realignment carousel came at a perfect time, because Sampson had thoroughly conquered the AAC, going from second-to-last in his first season in 2015 to top-three finishes the next three years to a league title in 2019. Over its final five years in the American, Houston won four regular-season titles, the lone exception coming with an asterisk in a pandemic-altered 2020-21 season in which Wichita State played four fewer conference games due to COVID-19-related cancellations and prevailed by a half-game.
“I think as a competitor Chief was ready for the next challenge,” said Kellen Sampson, who serves as his father’s top assistant on staff. “And he was ready to go see if what we built and what we were about was good enough to hold up against the best league in basketball. It reignited some significant competitive juices. Our last year of the American, we were having to use ‘When we get to March’ tactics too much. It allowed us to crash through a ceiling that we had over us.”
Had Houston not been invited, Kellen doubts his dad would have stayed at Houston. To compete in this era, you have to have a spot in one of the big leagues and the resources that come with it. Kelvin may have chased that or returned to the NBA as a head coach.
But once Houston got the invite, it was a chance to come full-circle, back to the league where Sampson made his name over 12 years at Oklahoma. A chance to show Houston wasn’t just a really good team taking advantage of a mediocre league. The assumption was that Houston would be good in the Big 12 but not dominant like it was in the AAC.
Sampson says he had other concerns two summers ago. The team he had led through the school’s final year in the AAC had three eventual first-round draft picks in the starting lineup. The Cougars had to replace Jarace Walker, the No. 8 pick in the 2023 NBA Draft, Marcus Sasser, the No. 25 pick and a first-team All-American, and the late Reggie Chaney, a bruiser whom Sampson calls one of his all-time favorite players.
While they’d succeeded with transfers before — the 2022 team started three of them en route to the Elite Eight — Sampson and his staff added only L.J. Cryer from Baylor to replace Sasser and trusted what they had was enough. Houston has spent the ensuing offseasons when most are portaling “pouring, developing and loving” on their returners. “From spring to the start of school in the fall is when returners improve the most,” Kellen Sampson said.
And for the one portal add each year — last spring Milos Uzan arrived from Oklahoma to replace All-American Jamal Shead — the Houston staff locked in on their target early.
“You’re allowed to really, really vet the guy you’re getting,” Kellen Sampson said. “When you’re trying to get six or seven, that means that you’re probably recruiting double or triple that amount. And you just don’t have the time to do real comprehensive backgrounds on all of them and really get into the weeds and figure out if this is a good fit. When you only target a small number, you just get to ask the questions that sometimes you don’t want to know the answer to.”
The Cougars have clearly landed the right two in Cryer, the 2024-25 team’s leading scorer, and Uzan, who scored a career-high 22 points on Monday night. And this season has played out almost perfectly for the head coach to hit all the right motivational notes. The Cougars started out 4-3 after losing two games at the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas, which Sampson said reintroduced some humility.
“We’ve won so much that sometimes people around here think it’s easy, but it’s not easy,” Kelvin Sampson said. “Milos was going to be the key. He wasn’t ready to be the guy he is now in November. I didn’t overreact to anything in November. He got better in December. He started getting better in January. Now I trust him complacently. He’s gone from a kid that we had to get better to a kid we all trust and he feeds off that. He’s playing with a lot of confidence.”
The thing about a garden is you cannot just leave it alone. The work is daily. And Sampson says he lives half-to-half. You can see it on his face on the sideline. He never looks satisfied.
But on Monday night, the 69-year-old took a few moments to turn reflective. He was reminded that the Cougars started 1-2 in the Big 12 last season. Since then, they’ve gone 30-2 in the league. And if they win one more game (or if Arizona loses once in the final two weeks), they’ll join Kansas as the only programs to win back-to-back Big 12 titles outright.
“Wow,” Sampson said. “That’s high-tiding right there, because Kansas is the standard bearer. Not just in the Big 12, they’ve been the standard bearer for college basketball for a long time.”
But in the seven seasons since Sampson got things rolling in 2018, Houston has arguably been better than Kansas and most perennial contenders: No program has won more games or more regular season conference titles. (Houston and Gonzaga are now tied in the latter department.) Houston has been to one Final Four during that stretch. The only thing missing is a national title.
“We’ve just stayed consistent,” Sampson said. “We don’t have a lot of highs and lows. We’re kind of independent. We run our program the way we see fit.”
Sampson added Houston has had four athletic directors and five football coaches in his time, almost wearing the chaos around him as a badge of honor. Everything inside his walls have remained steady. His gift is the ability to get players to work and play harder than they could ever imagine.
“This is an everyman’s program that these kids earn their way,” Sampson said. “They have to earn their way in here every day. And it’s the work ethic. It’s become consistent with the winning.”
It’s a formula that works everywhere in college basketball, but it’s hard to find a coach who has perfected it better.
(Photo: John E. Moore III / Getty Images)
