How good would this team be with Caleb Mills and Nate Hinton added? This team is such a unit, I don't see how they could be better. Mark probably does not play if those two were still on the team. Did you see White when he was taken out of the game at the end? He was pissed.
It's a great day today. Final 4!. We get to sit back and watch the games today knowing we'll be there.
White put that on himself. He didn’t step up at the line and missed. When Oregon st. called timeout after, that let UH sub him for a better defensive lineup they needed. Obviously they got shutdown for the last minute and change. That’s just great coaching and making the right decisions to close out games.
White isn't even a starter. He played really well, the key offensive rebound, but he's quality depth this year. Grimes was taken out for fouling a three point shooter early in the second. Everyone is accountable this year. We love everyone, but don't miss or mess an assignment.
I have no problem with the decision, just commenting on White's desire to be in the game. And, yes, I know everybody wants to be in the game at that time, just that White let it show in a more overt way than usual. My guess is that he was not mad at being pulled, but mad for missing the free throws at that critical juncture. What do you think he is working on today?
I found some at Homefield, about to place an order. https://www.homefieldapparel.com/collections/vintage-houston-cougars-apparel-store?rsc=1016725
[The Athletic] ‘Our lights shine as bright as anybody else’s’: Houston, Kelvin Sampson are going to the Final Four, together Brian Hamilton INDIANAPOLIS — When the 1,000th game of his college basketball head coaching career ended, and something like deliverance found its way to Kelvin Sampson, he turned and hugged his son. Maybe the rest of it is complicated. It’s certainly a long story. But it came to that, like it or not, a father and his boy in each other’s arms and not letting go even as a celebration spread all around them. Houston is in a Final Four again, and the man who says you can’t be afraid to fail stood atop a ladder a little before 10 p.m. and cut the final strand of nylon and then ripped the damn net down. For good measure, a 65-year-old coach made a fist around that net and pumped it a dozen times in the general direction of the safely distanced and adoring fans who’d matriculated to Lucas Oil Stadium. A 67-61 win over Oregon State in the Midwest Region final linked one forever era of basketball to the next, even if it took close to four decades to get that job done. The coach who made it happen? People have their opinions about him. But isn’t Sampson sort of exactly perfect for this place and this program and this moment, an outlaw hero, his black hat traded in for the black Final Four-branded cap he wore Monday, riding high once again up the road from where it all came crashing down? “It’s not supposed to be easy,” Sampson said afterward. He wasn’t referring to himself. But also he kind of was, given the circumstances. Easy doesn’t really have a role in the Houston men’s basketball program. Not in the version that is two wins away from a national championship. The idea is to defend like hell and rebound like hell and pound away until you submit the opponent. No one did both of those things at once as well as Houston has this season. In 1981, Sampson took his first head coaching gig at Montana Tech. The school mascot is something called an Oredigger. It’s 40 years later and one might argue Sampson hasn’t lost that particular spirit of the place. And Monday night didn’t come easy, either, be it in the context of watching a 17-point lead vanish or in the context of a staff spending seven years excavating pride and identity and belief from under a fairly significant accumulation of rubble. There’s going to be talk about beating four double-digit seeds this March and there’s going to be talk about Sampson’s past, and what that all means or what everyone actually deserves, and that’s fine, but it likewise merits noting that deserves has nothing to do with it in a Houston program under the command of this coach. There’s what’s in front of you, and you fight past it or you don’t, and that’s all. “We may not have the brightest lights, but our lights shine as bright as anybody else’s because it’s all about team,” Sampson said. “We’ve taken a group of kids to get them to believe, and they’ve accomplished something nobody can take from them. They’ll always be known as a Final Four participant. They earned it too. I mean, they earned it.” The last leg on the return trip to the place Houston hadn’t visited since 1984 was surely and entirely about that irascibility, that gravely approach, generated by the head coach with a red polo tucked into black athletic joggers and funneled to the rest of the group. It’s something of a hilarious wonder to watch Sampson stalk a sideline and to hear the sandpaper in his throat every time he makes a coaching point; would that we all, approaching retirement age, have the energy and emotional investment it takes to mutter multiple infuriated expletives when a 20-something misses a free throw. It came through loud and clear in the relatively muted atmosphere at sparsely filled Lucas Oil Stadium: Sampson is hard on his group, precisely so it can pay that pique forward to the other side, and that is what saved the Cougars on Monday night. An ill-advised baseline jumper from big man Brison Gresham, that wound up short of the rim by several inches? “My goodness,” Sampson exclaimed, before turning his attention back to the 6-foot-8 senior with one instruction: “Don’t do that!” An ill-advised foul by senior forward Fabian White Jr. on an Oregon State player who was flinging up a fadeaway jumper? “Fabiaaaan!” Sampson cried. “I didn’t touch him!” White Jr. offered, by way of explanation. “Yes you did!” Sampson replied, before stalking away and shaking his head. The persnickety-ness is pathological. But Sampson knows. He knows defeat is seeded in those tiny lapses. His team led by 17 at halftime, throttling Oregon State’s offense to the point the Beavers posted just 0.607 points per possession before the break, but there Sampson was, entirely outraged by what he saw in the first few moments when play resumed. “Seven to two to start the half!” he barked to everyone and no one in particular along the sideline, as if a high crime was being perpetrated before him. “Seven to two!” Moments later, during a timeout, he extended his right index finger and directed it toward junior guard Quentin Grimes and senior Justin Gorham, two of his most reliable rotation pieces. “You’re ball-watching,” Sampson declared with disgust, “and you’re ball-watching, and they scored five points!” It was nothing and everything. Houston doesn’t ball-watch and Houston doesn’t give up 7-2 runs because if that’s acceptable, well, look what happens. A team like Oregon State convinces itself that wonders never cease. A few shots don’t fall for the Cougars. And everything the program is after is in the balance when that gargantuan advantage disappears, and it is a tie game with less than four minutes to play. To fix it, Houston had to be everything its head coach insists it must be, at all times. This time the message was channeled through assistant coach Quannas White … but after playing for Sampson at Oklahoma and now coaching alongside him for the past four seasons, it might as well have been the big boss’ words, like a ventriloquist doll shooting flames out of its mouth. “Stop making excuses!” White told the Cougars. “Stop! ****ing! Making! Excuses!” Houston forced three misses and two turnovers on the next five defensive possessions, allowing zero field goals from the time the game was tied until there were just 20 seconds left, by which time the Cougars’ lead had climbed back to eight. It turned hope into ash, just like its coach demands, just like it had done on 27 previous occasions this season, and when the buzzer sounded the players sprinted to the far end of the floor to celebrate while a manager raced everyone’s cell phone over to the scorer’s table, so that players and staff could document a release 37 years in the making. “It never really was doubt, just following the plan he set in place for us,” said senior guard DeJon Jarreau, the region’s most outstanding player, alluding to the program-wide rise more than the survival Monday. “Just going out there every night, playing hard and letting our culture take care of a lot of games, which our culture did today. Oregon State fought back, and our culture took over. We got on the offensive glass. We got extra possessions. We work on that every day in practice. All the sprints in June, July — we do that to be here in March. And it was all worth it.”
Jarreau and Houston have advanced to the Final Four because, among other things, they’re willing to dive after every loose ball. (Robert Deutsch / USA Today) Sampson, of course, stayed out of the sweaty mass of humanity behind in the arms of his son, Kellen, one of his assistant coaches. A couple minutes later he’d have one arm around his daughter, Lauren, and the other around Kellen, and Kellen would cry as his father said whatever he said in the family huddle. Once they broke it up, Kelvin used a shirt sleeve to wipe away his own tears before he made his way to the baseline for an obligatory post-victory television interview, during which he had a bucket of red and white confetti dumped on his shoulders. Complexities abounded. He is the coach who returns to the apex of the sport a little less than two decades following his first trip up with Oklahoma in 2002. He is also the coach who ran afoul of the NCAA at Indiana and received a five-year show-cause penalty and spent six years in a sort of hoops purgatory as an NBA assistant. He is the son who wished his father was there to see all of this, after a brain aneurysm suffered the night before a Sweet 16 game in ’02 kept John W. Sampson from attending that Final Four. He’s the coach who stood near midcourt and took photos with any player or staff member who wanted them after Monday’s win, who duly credited everyone else for gifting him something he couldn’t be sure he’d ever possess again. “This is one of the greatest accomplishments I’ve been around,” Sampson said. “And I have this group of players and this staff — everyone on this staff, all the players — to thank for it. I’m glad they let me go along on the ride with them. It’s been a fun ride with this group.” Sampson is all of those above things, inextricably, and everyone is free to sort out what it means. You can decide whether he’s worth your vitriol or your sympathies. He is, as of now, the head coach of a men’s basketball team bound for the Final Four. That is what’s in front of him. That’s the fight he and his team get through, or they don’t. That’s all there is. There’s no reason to be afraid of failing. He has lived that before. And look what happened next.
Fanatics has the shirts, is Academy going to have them ? https://www.fanatics.com/college/ho...+z-9-1658479188?_ref=p-CLP:m-GRID:i-r0c0:po-0
Think the round NCAA final 4 logo is one of the better ones in the in the last two decades, but that's not saying a lot. It's boring, but at least it's not choppy. I like the black shirt much better than the red, but neither excites me.
Well I just called Academy and they said they will most likely not be selling the shirts...so back to the drawing board, I want one before Saturdays game.
The UH main on campus store will probably get a delivery before Saturday. You may want to check with them if you don’t want to wait but I believe the shirts are supposed to arrive tomorrow
They’re getting run out of the building. The pac 12 is going home today. USC doesn’t have the experience or guards for this
