NFL
By: Kevin Lucas
Despite James Harden being traded recently and Deshaun Watson being frustrated with the Houston Texans’ front office, not all is bad in Houston, Texas. Kelvin Sampson is currently leading the Houston Cougars to yet another highly successful season, all while losing one of their best players to the transfer portal in Caleb Mills. Since arriving in H-Town in 2014, Sampson has had only one losing season and that was his very first season as the head coach for the Cougars. Excluding that first year and Sampson has had nothing but winning seasons since then and hasn’t taken his foot off of the gas even a little bit. It’s two huge factors to why Sampson knows nothing but success since his second season and that first factor is having elite guard play. Go back throughout the course of college basketball history and all of the great teams in college hoops either have a guard that’s a true floor general or a guard that can get you a bucket from wherever and whenever. Coach Sampson consistently has multiple guards like this on his roster going back to Rob Gray and Corey Davis Jr. to now having guys like Marcus Sasser and DeJon ‘Deeky” Jarreau. Guard play in March is always essential if you want to make a deep run in the Big Dance and Houston knows that and that’s why they recruit these types of guards (and land) them frequently.
The second major factor to why coach Sampson has sustained success during his tenure in Houston is their active and extremely disruptive defense that usually throws the opposing team’s offense out of rhythm and knocks them off balance as well. A staple of their defense is double-teaming the ball when it enters the post with both their power forward and center because of their length trying to force turnovers and cause mayhem. And when you have your bigs doubling the post aggressively it leaves the rest of your players in a 3-on-4 disadvantage (for most teams) but what coach Sampson and his staff have done a wonderful job of, is instilling strict defensive principles into his players like knowing angles to take and cutting off passing lanes. More often times than not when your team is on offense and one of your players gets double teamed you automatically know as a player or coach, that someone on your team is not being guarded. But yet that is simply not the case with Houston because they play with active hands, creating steals, deflections, and easy scoring opportunities. In addition to their aggressive double teams, another thing Houston does really well on defense better than most teams in the country is helping the helper. The original phrase is “help the helper” but essentially it is a term where say a player gets beat off of the dribble, then another defender must come over to help stop the ball leaving their original assignment open, so as their teammate on defense you must rotate areas to cover the ground for that teammate that helped over to start with originally, which at the end of the day is just great team defense. Year in and year out Houston does a great job of this and it’s a huge component to why they have had this much success under coach Sampson.
Currently, in the middle of this 2020-21 pandemic season, the Houston Cougars sit with a record of 11-1 and 6-1 in conference play and are the 8th ranked team in the nation. They also look like the clear-cut favorites to win the American Athletic Conference regular-season title for the third consecutive season. With the true point guard play from Marcus Sasser and the scoring prowess of Quentin Grimes as well as the all-around play from “Deeky” Jarreau alongside the rest of this veteran-lead squad and the Houston Cougars will be a team that most teams will not want to see in the NCAA Tournament come March. It is only a matter of time before they make a run back to the Final Four and a large part of that will be because of the greatness that is head coach Kelvin Sampson. At 65 years of age and an overall record of 150 wins and 61 losses in his time in Space City, it doesn’t look like he’s going to be slowing down anytime soon so not all is bad in Houston sports-wise. By the time his coaching career comes to an end, the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame will gladly induct Kelvin Sampson into its legendary fraternity.
Fantastic write up, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it! Go Coogs.
Thank you John!