There's no space in this Houston program

A defense that improves by the year has sent the Cougars back to the Final Four.

Houston’s L.J. Cryer

Tennessee was supposedly facing its mirror image in the NCAA Midwest Regional final on Sunday. Instead it looked through a magnifying glass. The image was terrifying.

The Volunteers missed their first 14 three-point attempts, and 22 of 28 shots overall. The paint was bordered by barbed wire. Nobody could penetrate, let alone score. Tennessee did not get its third field goal until 10:38 remained in the first half, It trailed at halftime, 34-15, a scoring low for any first or second seed in any NCAA tournament.

The final was 69-50, and Houston rose to its second Final Four under the tutelage of Kelvin Sampson. Wins on Saturday and Monday will give the Cougars, now 34-4, their first national championship after decades of running into Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Patrick Ewing and North Carolina State airballs that became ambrosia. It would also give Sampson, 69, his 800th career win. The semifinal opponent is Duke, which eliminated Houston in last year’s Final 16 and is functioning at a celestial level. The Cougars will be undercats and that’s just fine. This isn’t just a superb basketball team. It’s the latest model in a superb product line.

The Cougars’ identity is unrelenting defense, hammered out by Sampson over the course of 11 seasons in Houston. His final Oklahoma team, in 2014, ranked only 95th in defensive efficiency, as measured by KenPom.com. This one is No. 1. Opponents are shooting 36.4 percent overall and 30.6 percent on 3-pointers. Three of the four losses were in overtime, and all four were by a total of 14 points. Only Alabama and Kansas (in double overtime) scored 80 or more points on Houston. Sixteen opponents scored 55 or fewer.

Along the way Houston has lost 23 games in the past five seasons. It was a top-level team in the American Athletic Conference, with Memphis as its main rival. Then the Cougars joined the Big 12, the best hoop league at the time. Houston has won the league the past two years and went 19-1 this season. The last school to hop into a major conference and win two consecutive titles? Idaho, in the Pacific Coast Conference, 1922 and 1923.

There are no visible gimmicks in the Houston defense. There also is nobody over 6-foot-8 in the starting lineup, although JoJo Tugler had 73 blocks while he averaged 21.8 minutes this season, making him a national Defensive Player of the Year candidate. Sampson keeps his big men, Tugler and/or J’Wan Roberts, in the paint at almost all times. When the ball goes inside, two Cougars attack the receiver, and the other three converge in what Sampson calls a “monster” trap. It’s also a hostage situation. Once the ball is in, it can’t get out.

Sampson was an assistant coach for the Milwaukee Bucks after he was fired at Indiana and before he came to Houston. That was a cleansing experience, and a post-grad course in defensive strategy, especially in the screen roll. If teams try to get Tugler or Roberts in screen situations outside, the Cougar bigs almost always jump out to confront the ballhandler and make it difficult to pass to the “roller.” The rest of the defenders look for hurried passes, reading the passer’s eyes as a free safety would. There is enough help to have created at least 30 steals this season for seven different Cougars. So there’s structure and detail to the chaos. But the bottom line is just stubborn effort.

The difference this season is a more diversified offense, with three shooters who hit over 40 percent from three. One is L.J. Cryer, who was on Baylor’s NCAA title team in 2021. When the Cougars do miss shots, they do not adjourn the possession. On Sunday they had 14 offensive rebounds. Tennessee, which came in as the nation’s sixth-ranked team with 30 wins, had 15 field goals.

“My message today was don’t be afraid to take the big shot,” Sampson said on Sunday. “What’s the worst that can happen? You miss it. We’re also a good offensive rebounding team. I’d rather miss a shot than make a turnover. You can’t rebound a turnover.”

No program has contributed more to the lore of college basketball, without winning a championship, than Houston. The Cougars beat UCLA in 1968 in front of a sold-out, frenzied Astrodome, the first sign that college basketball could escape its conventional boundaries. They participated in what people called the first game of the 21st century, the astounding dunk-a-thon against Louisville in the 1983 national semifinals, two days before the Cougars kept short-arming free throws and allowed Dereck Whittenburg and Lorenzo Charles to stumble into perhaps the Bobby Thomson moment of college basketball history.

They have given us Elvin Hayes and Don Chaney and Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler and the rest of Phi Slama Jama, the brainchild of Houston Post beat writer Tommy Bonk.

But none of those flamboyant, airborne Cougars loomed larger in real life than they appeared in the mirror. Not like these.