Cougars Overcome 14-Point Deficit and Low Expectations

An upset propels Houston to the men’s final versus Florida.

The New York Times

Lunedì 7 Aprile 2025

Pagina 41

SAN ANTONIO — Forward J’Wan Roberts extended his hands. Settle down, he begged.

Yes, this was impossible.

Yes, this whole swirling, bizarre night was on the verge of alchemy.

Yes, this was about to be the night that the Houston men’s basketball team pulled off a comeback so stunning, so jarring, that it would take everyone — specifically those souls in Durham, N.C. — a lifetime to sort out.

Roberts, 23, arrived at this moment with all appropriate prefaces. He spent the previous two hours trying to stay in front of Cooper Flagg’s deep bag of spins and crossovers. He spent the entirety of this season working endlessly on his free-throwing shooting, putting up 150 a day from the stripe, every day, no matter what.

He spent the last five years as part of a Houston program that does not suffer fools, and he wanted so desperately to take his teammates to a Monday night in April.

Now the 6-foot-8, 235-pound Roberts had a free throw to give the Cougars an improbable lead in their Final Four game against Duke — their first lead since the 15-minute mark of the first half.

The clock said 19 seconds.

In what would end as a stunning 70-67 Houston win, this is when it all began to feel very real.

“Wasn’t really nervous at all,” Roberts said.

They’re built different at Houston. Coach Kelvin Sampson has long made sure of it. And that is why a team that trailed mighty Duke, 59-45, with eight minutes left in the second half of Saturday night’s second national semifinal is now in the national championship game. On Monday night, Houston will play Florida for the Division I title.

How could that possibly top what occurred here on Saturday?

We’ll see.

“If you have a culture,” Sampson said, “quitting is not part of the deal. We’re not going to quit. We’re just going to play better.” It all happened fast but will now last forever. Duke looked poised to prevail even after seeing its 14point lead cut to a two-possession lead. It was over when Flagg hit a 3, pushing the lead back to 9 with 3 minutes 3 seconds left. And it was over when Joseph Tugler accidentally slapped the ball out of Sion James’s hands on an inbounds pass with 1:14 left, earning a technical foul and sending Sampson crumpling to the floor on the sideline.

But then, over the last 33 seconds, it all happened. Want to know why Houston is Houston?

Check out Tugler. Unfazed by the boneheaded mistake, he blocked Kon Knueppel’s driving layup with a minute to go, keying a crucial defensive stand. After an Emanuel Sharp 3 made Duke officially uncomfortable (67-64, 33 seconds left), Tugler was one of three Houston players to tip a regrettable inbounds pass from James, setting off a frenzied sequence. In a blur, Mylik Wilson launched a 3 while Tugler stood unattended for the put-back dunk.

Then came Roberts’s free throws. Then came two more from L.J. Cryer.

Like that, a 9-0 run to close the night set the Alamodome into a hot, breathless dream machine.

Houston’s 14-point comeback is the fifth-largest deficit overcome in Final Four history.

“As long as there’s time on the clock, we’re going out there and giving it our all,” said Cryer, who scored 26 points, playing every second of every minute. “We’ve been in positions like that before at Kansas, I don’t remember how much we was down, but it was late in the game, that game looked like it was pretty much over, too. Somehow we ended up winning.” 

It’s hard to make history in a city known for putting men on the moon, but this Houston team could be the one to finally raise a long-awaited banner. In its seventh Final Four appearance, the program of Guy V. Lewis and Elvin Hayes and Otis Birdsong and Phi Slama Jama is making its third trip to the title game. The 1983 team should have won it all, if not for Dereck Whittenburg’s heave, Lorenzo Charles’s dunk and Coach Jim Valvano’s mad dash for North Carolina State.

The Cougars returned to the national championship game the next year, despite losing Clyde Drexler to the N.B.A., but ended up on the wrong end of a duel between Hakeem Olajuwon and Patrick Ewing of Georgetown.

Now it’s 2025 and, in an age when Houston basketball could have easily been left for waste, the Cougars have instead climbed from a fringe power-conference program to a powerhouse on the cusp of a first national championship.

Eleven years ago, Sampson took over a program with a dilapidated arena, a regrettable conference affiliation and a distant history. Houston had been to one N.C.A.A. tournament in the 21 years before Sampson’s arrival.

He walked in the door and had the school in the tournament by Year 4, in the round of 16 by Year 5 and in the Final Four by Year 7.

Now it is in the title game.

It was hard in the end to remember that this was nearly a rout from the start.

Sampson, coaching the 50th N.C.A.A. tournament game of his 32-year head coaching career, screamed for his team to find itself after missing 14 of its first 17 shots Saturday night. Calling a timeout, down 18-10, he told CBS that something had to change. Cryer apparently heard him and got things going. A few 3s fell, and the Cougars kept the door on the frame.

“I don’t think we could play any worse,” Sampson said. “We were down 6 at halftime. So instead of ranting and raving, I was probably more calm and positive ’cause I thought that’s what they needed, you know?

” In the movie version, Flagg, Duke’s transcendent freshman, would have made a winning play and been carried off the court. But Houston does not do storybooks.

On the would-be go-ahead shot, Flagg was draped by Roberts and left an elbow jumper short with eight seconds to go.

For Duke Coach Jon Scheyer, there was regret aimed elsewhere. Duke made one field goal in the game’s final 10:31, missing eight of its last nine attempts. It allowed 42 second-half points and botched multiple endgame plays.

“Obviously as a coach, I’m reflecting right now what else I could have said or done,” Scheyer said. “I’m sure there’s a lot more that I could have done to help our guys at the end there. That’s the thing that kills me the most.

” The final play of the night was drawn up as a James-to-Flagg baseball pass with a stark likeness of Grant Hill-to-Christian Laettner. Only in this version, the final inbounds pass was knocked away.

Flagg, with 27 points in his final college game, untucked his jersey and walked toward the handshake line, and Houston players poured onto the floor.

Sampson, meanwhile, threw a fist through the air and tried to process what just happened.

Now comes Florida, a colossus of a matchup. While it was the Cougars who bounced the mighty Blue Devils, the Gators disposed of Auburn, the No. 1 overall seed, to reach Monday’s final The Gators came back from a 9-point second-half deficit to win, 79-73, riding a 34-point performance by Walter Clayton Jr.

By night’s end, that comeback was but a footnote.