SAN ANTONIO — All Kelvin Sampson could do was stand there, hands on hips with a blank look on his face, as the ball bounced loose and Houston’s latest chance at a national title bounced away, too.
The coach who has commanded all details over a 36-year career of wins, losses and a few Final Fours couldn’t do anything about this one. The last-second blunder ended in a 65-63 loss to Florida on Monday night.
It took years for the 69-year-old coaching lifer to turn Houston into one of college basketball’s top programs again — one built on defense, toughness, rebounding and doing things a certain, hard-nosed way. Sampson rehabilitated his image too, the pariah who nobody understood becoming an almost-lovable beacon for how to connect with players and do things the “right” way.
But there was no escape from the anguish this time, from squandering a 12-point second-half lead to that final-play turnover that sent Sampson into the offseason stuck on win No. 799 in a winding-road career.
“There’s always going to be naysayers and negative nellies and all that stuff, but that’s where your faith and your family is way more important than any of that stuff,” Sampson said outside Houston’s locker room in the Alamodome. “And protecting these kids, I care more protecting them right now to make sure they know what a great year they had. What an awesome, awesome, awesome year they had.”
The game ended with Houston (35-5) — which finished at No. 2 in the final AP Top 25 poll Tuesday — unable to even get up a shot on its last two possessions, a fact Sampson called “incomprehensible.” On one, Emanuel Sharp drove the right side but had the ball stripped and lost it out of bounds with 26.6 seconds left and Houston down one.
Moments later, Houston had its second chance to go ahead. The ball again went to Sharp, who tried to fire a 3-pointer on the catch only to see a hard closeout by Florida star Walter Clayton Jr. coming his way.
Stuck in the air, he tried to dribble the ball to avoid a turnover and was forced to let it bounce, the ball hitting the court with about 4.5 seconds left and then continuing to bounce for another 2-plus precious seconds. Finally Florida’s Alex Condon dove for the ball, sending Houston’s Ja’Vier Francis to the floor and killing the final moments of the Cougars’ title dream.
Moments later, as the confetti started to fall for the Gators, Sampson walked with his head down to the edge of the court as though trying to make sense of what had just happened. He descended the steps, then started making his way up the lane through the heaviest concentration of red-clad Houston fans in a painful march to the locker room.
“I wanted it so bad for him,” said Houston big man J’Wan Roberts, who played five seasons for Sampson after a redshirt year. “So, so, so bad. And it hurts. Coach Sampson, the role that he played in my life, I can’t even put into words.”
“Disappointing,” Sampson said. “But we didn’t lose in the first round. We didn’t lose in the CBI. We lost in the national championship game, to the best team the SEC has. We fought them tooth and nail down to the end, and I’m proud of my team.”
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