When the University of Houston introduced Kelvin Sampson as its head coach almost 11 years ago, the well-traveled basketball veteran stepped into one of the sport’s longest shadows. As the 2025 calendar turns to March, Sampson’s Cougars are setting a new standard for a program long synonymous exclusively with the late, great Guy Lewis.
Houston closes out its 2024-25 regular-season slate with games against Cincinnati on Saturday and two of the last three programs to win the national championship, Kansas and Baylor. However, the Cougars have already sealed no worse than a share of the Big 12 Conference championship.
Houston embarks on this stretch and the Big 12 Tournament playing for its third straight No. 1 seed and an inside track to its second Final Four appearance in five seasons. Not since Hall of Famer Guy Lewis coached the Cougars to three straight Final Fours from 1982 through 1984 has Houston enjoyed such success.
In fact, at no time since Lewis retired in 1986 has Houston reached the heights that are fast becoming routine for the Cougars under Sampson. From 1961, when the first Lewis-coached Houston team reached the NCAA Tournament, until the Hakeem Olajuwon-led national runner-up Cougars team of 1984, the program played in 14 editions of the Big Dance.
In the three decades between Lewis’ retirement and Sampson’s 2014 hire, only four Houston teams reached the NCAA Tournament—one fewer than the total Final Four appearances the program made under Lewis.
Yesteryear’s powerhouses fade from glory regularly in college basketball and spend generations chasing past success in futility. When Sampson came to Houston in 2014, the program was one such example, sharing qualities with teams like DePaul and UNLV: once-dominant juggernauts in cities that produce top-flight recruits, but who opt to go elsewhere.
Keeping in-state prospects around has been one pillar of Sampson’s resurrection of Houston basketball. His first NCAA Tournament team at UH in 2017-18 featured key players like Armoni Brooks of Round Rock and Fabian White of Atascocita, who grew into a standout on the 2022 Elite Eight team.
This year, Houston features forward J’Wan Roberts, a graduate of Shoemaker High School in Killeen, and L.J. Cryer of Katy. As a two-time All-Big 12 selection headed for a third, the Baylor transfer Cryer is the de facto star of the 2024-25 Cougars.
But if there’s another quality of Sampson’s tenure at Houston that best explains the program’s return to Lewis-era levels of prominence, it’s that the Cougars don’t rely on stars.
Make no mistake; Cryer is a terrific player. He shoots almost 42 percent from 3-point range and will finish a third consecutive season averaging in the neighborhood of 15 points per game.
However, other teams jockeying for No. 1 seeds alongside Houston include Auburn with Johni Broome, a stat-sheet-stuffing big man averaging a double-double per game. Broome’s a throwback to a time when dominant centers owned college basketball—a time like the mid-1980s when Olajuwon and Houston faced Patrick Ewing and Georgetown for the national championship.
Broome’s recent 31-point, 14-rebound effort against Georgia is unlike any stat line a Cougar is likely to produce. Cryer went for 28 points in a pivotal win over Iowa State, but just five the next time out against Texas Tech.
The results of those two games were the same, though: Houston wins that secured the Cougars’ stake to the Big 12 championship.
And then there’s fellow No. 1 seed contender Duke, built around the explosive game of likely No. 1 NBA draft pick Cooper Flagg. The freshman phenom compares to Lewis-era Houston greats in that his NBA readiness is clear in college.
Indeed, Lewis’ best Houston teams were built around players like Elvin Hayes, Clyde Drexler, and Olajuwon—college stars who went on to pro greatness.
It’s rare for college teams to compete for championships without NBA talent, and Sampson has and continues to attract future pros to his program. His teams differ from Lewis’ Final Four squads in that this era of NBA-bound Cougars are not the individually dominant presences of the past.
And in that contrast lies another characteristic that explains Sampson’s success with a program that seemed destined to long for days gone by. Sampson has unlocked Houston’s potential to return to its prior peak not by emulating what defined the program before, but by embracing his own philosophy.
No one will confuse the aggressive, defensive-oriented style of the present-day Cougars with Phi Slamma Jamma, but it’s Houston’s hard-nosed approach that makes it successful. Tune into a UH game, and you are guaranteed to see maximum effort from all five players on the court for all 40 minutes.
It’s a trait that made Sampson-coached teams winners elsewhere, from a historically downtrodden program like Washington to his tenure at Oklahoma, which produced a Final Four run. This is also the identity that could elevate Houston to a milestone that not even the great Guy Lewis reached: a national championship.
