SAN ANTONIO — Forty-six minutes from the moment the buzzer sounded on men’s college basketball’s tightest-knit family, the big red door that separated the Houston Cougars from the outside world finally opened.
Inside, a locker room that had been shoulder-to-shoulder throughout the week all the sudden felt empty. A few players lingered, most with towels over their heads. The senior class, one that had stuck it out together to “run it back” one last time and keep swinging at that elusive crown, had largely vanished, likely into the privacy of the bathrooms from which expletives and tears echoed off the walls.
In the middle of the room, pushed off against a wall, was a whiteboard that read just “35–5.”
Every game, no matter the venue, that whiteboard was updated with the Cougars’ record and next opponent. The loss column had been updated just once since the end of November, but that was never the most important piece of information on that board. Houston’s program has always been about what’s next, and the emptiness underneath that gaudy record indicated the finality of the moment in that devastated room.
“Best team I’ve ever been a part of,” sophomore JoJo Tugler, among the only Cougars who could bear to speak, says. “The chemistry we had, it was different.”
The weight of a loss like the one Houston had just suffered—seeing its 12-point second-half lead evaporate and watching as the ball bounced and trickled away from a helpless Emanuel Sharp as the clock struck zero—would be enough on its own to be devastated. But it was more than Monday night's 65–63 loss to the Florida Gators that swept over a broken team, even as the minutes clicked toward an hour since that final horn.
Culture is the most overused word in college sports today, but it might not be strong enough to describe the bond that had built within this Cougar family. And yes, it is quite literally a family, with head coach Kelvin Sampson’s son, Kellen, also his top assistant and his daughter, Lauren, his director of operations. This is a team that usually watches film the day before home games at Sampson’s house, with games of Uno and playtime with the coach’s dogs mixed in. J’Wan Roberts has been part of it for six years, Ja’Vier Francis for four, Sharp and Terrance Arceneaux for three, many others for at least two. The bonds were and are deep, and the signature ending that has been dreamed about for years had just come up short in excruciating fashion.
“I’m mostly sad that I can’t do it with them again,” Roberts said. “That’s the worst part.”
The emotions seemed more like shock in the coaches’ locker room. When first allowed in, Kellen Sampson sat in his chair, both hands on his head, a blank stare on his face into nothingness. He later recounted possession after possession of what had gone wrong, from missed screens and other minor details to quality shots that just didn’t drop. Those had undoubtedly rattled through his brain time and time again over the previous hour as he attempted to process failing to deliver that elusive national championship to his father, whose career is on its last legs. Quannas White, a former Sampson point guard at Oklahoma in his last game with Houston before he becomes the head coach at the University of Louisiana, sat with both fists holding up his face, his eyes locked on the ground and nothing else. Lauren sat on the floor, against a wall, almost in shock. This group, perhaps even more than the players in the adjacent room, had desperately tried to bring home that title, and it would be hard to ever get over just how close they had come.
“You’ve got so many program guys that invested and loved to the tips of their toes, to the ends of their fingers, this program, each other, the staff,” Kellen Sampson says. “This team in so many ways is—was—a deserving and worthy champion.”
In the 40 or so minutes from that door closing for one last postgame talk and it opening again for public consumption, Kelvin Sampson implored his team to be disappointed by the loss, but not in what they had accomplished or how they had played to get there. Sharp, who was inconsolable on the floor in the moments after his costly turnover, attempted to take the blame for the defeat; his teammates were having none of it. Any assertion that the loss should sit on his shoulders was quickly shut down.
“It ain’t his fault,” Roberts says. “He came in the locker room and said he was sorry, but it ain’t his fault … we know how special Emanuel is. I’m going to comfort him as much as possible and I’m going to defend his name if anyone tries to make it worse than what it is.”
Roberts, the longest-tenured Cougar player, was perhaps the most composed of his teammates as he navigated the swarm of cameras and iPhones inches from his face. He had embodied the program’s culture, signing on with the help of a cousin who had played for Sampson at Oklahoma and quickly became an all-time Houston man. Perhaps the result hadn’t sunk in yet. If nothing else, the finality of not being a daily part of the Cougar program hadn’t.
“I don’t think it’s going to hit me until I’m kicked out of all the lifting group chats and student-manager group chats [for shooting], I think that’s when it’s going to hit,” Roberts says. “Right now, I’m still in there.”
But even if Roberts and the rest of the seniors still pop in as often as possible as they say they plan to do, this moment will serve as a permanent changing of the guard for a program built on continuity. And illustrating that came in the opposite corner of the locker room to the one Roberts had just sat. Two Cougar freshmen, Mercy Miller and Kordelius Jefferson, stood by their lockers next to the buffet table stuffed with untouched burritos the team couldn’t stomach. While just as broken up as the rest of the room, the two were perhaps the only Cougars who could fathom thinking ahead toward the future.
“I swear we going to be back!” Jefferson repeated as he embraced Miller, over and over again.
You’d love to believe they will, and on paper, this shouldn’t be the end of the Houston window. Roberts, Cryer and other essential pieces will depart, but one of the top recruiting classes in the country that features a pair of five-star prospects is on its way to help replace them. Chances like this don’t come often, if ever, for a lot of programs, but few have knocked at the door harder and more frequently than the Cougars have in the last five years under Sampson. The 69-year-old ball coach may be in the twilight of his career, but there should be at least a bite or two more at the apple.
“It’s not a matter of if, it’s when,” Kellen Sampson says. “The best thing we can do is keep building teams that give us a lick at the piñata. We took an awesome lick at that thing this year. I thought we had busted it open. We would’ve been the one that got the candy confetti on us.
“This particular Monday night, they didn’t get crowned, but there will be a Monday night when we do get crowned.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as How Houston’s Tight-Knit Team Came to Terms With Season’s Disappointing End.
