What Kelvin Sampson said during his guest appearance on an Oklahoma radio program
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Houston basketball coach Kelvin Sampson still has fond memories of his days coaching at Oklahoma.
On Thursday afternoon, Sampson was a guest on “The Dominant Duo,” a popular radio show on WWLS-FM in Oklahoma City, hosted by two of the state’s longtime sports talk show personalities, Jim Traber - a former Major League Baseball player - and Al Eschbach. Traber and Eschbach both knew Sampson well when the latter coached the Sooners from 1994-06.
During Sampson’s appearance on “The Dominant Duo,” he touched on several topics, including the Cougars’ loss to Florida in the national title game, dealing with the new realities of NIL and how his time in the NBA - working as an assistant coach after his well-publicized resignation as Indiana’s coach in 2008 - helped prepare him for his comeback to the college game when he took over the Houston program in 2014.
Sampson on Houston’s loss to Florida in the national championship game
“Making the NCAA Tournament, and I think every coach in America would agree with this, your first goal is to make the tournament; there’s never a guarantee. We lost the Big 12 Player of the Year, the Naismith Basketball Defensive Player of the Year in (point guard) Jamal Shead and we called in a former Sooner, Milos Uzan, to replace him.
“We started the year off 4-3, and then from that point on, we went 31-1 and a big reason for that was Milos’ development and the fact that we had four starters back. The people that helped him the most was our players, and once we got to the Big 12, I felt like we were prepared to play in the tournament, and I still think the most amazing thing that this team accomplished this year was going 10-0 on the road in the league.
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“They always talk about the Kansas game, but there’s no way we could have won that game, but we found a way and I think that helped us beat Duke (in the Final Four semifinals) because it was very similar. We were down, and the next thing you know, we come back. But the Duke game took a lot out of us, just like the Auburn game took a lot out of Florida (in the other national semifinal).
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“But very rarely do you have four No. 1 seeds, and I thought going in, any of the four teams could win it. Auburn could beat Florida and Duke could beat us, but it so happens that we beat Duke and Florida beat Auburn, and it was a tough loss for us. But I don’t ever lose sight of the journey, with a group of kids that you have. … It’s hard to win on Monday night (the date of the national championship game), it really is.
“Just one of those good runs we jumped on and we’ve had some good teams here at Houston and this one, I thought, was good enough to win it; we just fell two points short.”
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Sampson on navigating things with NIL
“I remember I went to Iraq and Kuwait with the Department of Defense with (U.S. secretary of defense Donald) Rumsfeld; they sent eight coaches over there and we had a basketball tournament for the troops, and that was one of the most moving experiences I’ve ever had. Not everybody agrees with the war, why we were in the Middle East, why we were in Vietnam. You don’t have to agree with it, but what you have to do is support our troops. And I think it’s the same thing with NIL It doesn’t matter whether I agree with it or not, if I don’t embrace it and not compete with it, then you’re going to get left behind.
“I think it’s going to bleed a lot of athletic departments; I’m worried about the Olympic sports and how long we can support them, knowing that all the money that usually goes to them, whether it’s for travel or equipment or hiring staff, a lot of that money now has to go to NIL.
“I remember when we built the new practice facility there at OU and you think about all the things that Oklahoma State has, the unbelievable facilities they have there in basketball and football, how much of that is going to be important anymore? If you are an athletic department, where money is tight, something has to give.
“What can not give is putting a roster on the court or on the field, no matter what sport it is, that’s going to be competitive because fans want their teams to win and if you’re going to win at this level, whether it’s in the SEC with OU or Oklahoma State and Houston in the Big 12, we have to have rosters that are competitive. … Some schools’ budgets, that paid for salaries or travel for six or seven different sports, but now it just goes to one team’s roster. I see (OU football coach) Brent Venables, what he’s doing with the NIL; I think Porter (Moser, OU basketball coach) is doing a great job with the NIL, and if they don’t, they’re not going to have a job.”
Sampson on how his experience as an NBA assistant coach helped with his return to college coaching
“I think two things. First of all, Gregg Popovich with the (San Antonio) Spurs and Scott Skiles with the Milwaukee Bucks, and then Kevin McHale and Daryl Morey with the Houston Rockets, I don’t think I would qualify to be a really good NBA coach when I first got to the NBA, but I was humble enough to sit and learn and listen, and see how those guys did it.
“A 24 second shot clock, the ability to hunt mismatches. … I already knew what spacing was, but not like the NBA does. We still play defense, we still rebound, we still play hard, we still do all of that stuff, but we put in really good guards, spacing the floor and letting them go make plays, I think that’s where I just kind of loosened up the reins to let our guys go.
“That’s why, in the last four years, I think we’ve had five kids drafted in the NBA. … That’s allowed us to go recruit other kids because they see Houston as a program where you can make the NBA. I think Milos Uzan’s going to get drafted, and if he can get drafted and get a guaranteed contract, then he can go to the NBA, he couldn’t come back to college.
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“Choosing the right coaching staff is important but making sure that coaching staff has developed players that play like me, that look like me, that allow me to play the way I want to play. But the NBA was everything to me. … I don’t think I would be nearly as successful at Houston without having been in the NBA for six years.”
On J’Wan Roberts, who spent six seasons at Houston
(The now-graduated forward is the program’s all-time winningest player and was named first-team All-Big 12 this past season. Roberts is also the only Cougar to have played on both of Sampson's Final Four teams, in 2021 and this past season.)
“He (has an) unbelievable high-IQ, tremendous character, the kind of kid you want leading your program because all he cares about is winning. And he stayed with us for six years; he got a COVID year and a redshirt year and then his four years, so I had him for six years.”
