The History of Houston Heartbreak Adds Another Chapter
In the 1980s, Houston’s Phi Slama Jama team dominated men’s college basketball. It never won a national title. Four decades later, the Cougars’ best team since then fell just short of glory—but gave fans reason to believe in the dream of what comes next.
Over the final month of the 2024-25 men’s basketball season, the Houston Cougars almost always found ways to win. It didn’t matter if shots weren’t going down, or if momentum was slipping away. If the Cougars couldn’t overwhelm their opponents early, they would wriggle away from them late.
On March 8, the Cougars managed to hold off Baylor even though Houston didn’t score a basket in the final 6:07 of regulation. A week later, they fought back against Arizona after being down by seven points in the second half. Against Purdue in the Sweet 16, they coughed up a 10-point lead before scoring a game-winning basket with 0.9 seconds left. And then there was their historic Final Four performance against Duke, when they erased a 14-point deficit in the final eight minutes for a 70-67 victory. It’s not hyperbole to say that the win on Saturday night was as important as any the once-great program had recorded in five decades.
In his 11th season at the helm, 69-year-old head coach Kelvin Sampson finally seemed to have everything he needed to capture his elusive first national championship. Bringing home a title would complete Sampson’s Hall of Fame résumé and eliminate Houston’s cursed claim as the only men’s basketball program with six or more Final Four berths and no championship to show for it.
So when Emanuel Sharp rose for the go-ahead 3-pointer with five seconds left against Florida on Monday night, it almost seemed predestined that the Cougars had one more escape act left in this storybook season.
Then Sharp double-pumped to elude a defender and dropped the ball to avoid getting stuffed on the 3-point attempt. The ball squirted away, and Florida fell on it as the clock ran out, sealing the Gators’ come-from-behind 65-63 win. It was a third national championship for the Gators, who have established themselves as one of college basketball’s blue bloods over the past quarter century. The title will be a nice addition to the school’s trophy case, but it won’t change much about its place in the college sports hierarchy.
Yet a win would’ve meant everything for the Cougars, who have always come up short in the most critical moments—when such moments have come along at all. Houston’s place among the nation’s elite is conditional, dependent on its coach, its conference, and its administration’s commitment to pursuing the highest level of success.
That’s why it hurt so much for Sampson and Houston to fall short once again. Longtime fans of the team know that these opportunities are few and far between—and that the heartbreak of not capitalizing can become inextricably tied to a program’s identity.
My first memory of sports heartbreak was that iconic moment from the 1983 men’s national championship game when Lorenzo Charles plucked Dereck Whittenburg’s air ball out of the sky and dropped it through the hoop at the buzzer to help North Carolina State stun the heavily favored Cougars.
For most fans, NC State’s last-second triumph was the peak of Cinderella euphoria. For those who grew up in Houston like me, it was a cruel misfortune. That Houston team—known as Phi Slama Jama for its high-flying, power-dunking style of play—came as close to winning a title as humanly possible. Then Charles snatched its glory away, a nightmare that Cougars fans have to relive every spring when TV producers replay March Madness’s most legendary finishes. I cannot begin to explain how tired I am of watching Jim Valvano run around to nowhere in particular.
The Cougars came up short again a year later in the title game against Patrick Ewing and Georgetown, a more understandable but still painful outcome. Then Akeem Olajuwon left school early to become the no. 1 pick in the 1984 NBA draft, and head coach Guy V. Lewis suffered through a pair of 14-loss seasons before retiring in 1986. Almost immediately afterward, Houston’s program ceased being nationally relevant. The Cougars would qualify for the NCAA tournament just four times over the next 31 years.
That stretch of futility happened even as football-mad Texas—and Houston, in particular—blossomed into a major hub for high school basketball talent. And the Cougars missed out on virtually all of the top prospects in the area.
Rashard Lewis and Gerald Green skipped college to enter the NBA draft. T.J. Ford and Daniel “Boobie” Gibson signed with Texas. Emeka Okafor chose Connecticut. DeAndre Jordan went to Texas A&M. Even Justise Winslow, son of Phi Slama Jama alum Rickie Winslow, opted for Duke.
In the decade before Sampson was hired in 2014, the Cougars signed only two four- or five-star prospects out of local high schools: Danrad Knowles, who went on to average 7.6 points per game for his college career, and Danuel House, who played well at Houston for two seasons before transferring to Texas A&M. Sampson also started off slow on the recruiting trail, leaning mostly on junior college transfers and failing to land an elite high school recruit in his first four classes.
In 2016, Houston’s football program made a national statement by landing defensive lineman Ed Oliver, who broke precedent by becoming the first five-star prospect to sign with a program outside the then–Power Five conferences. Days after Hurricane Harvey swept through town in 2017, I visited the campus to profile him. Oliver was still stewing over the offseason departure of football coach Tom Herman, who went to Texas after convincing him to take a chance on Houston. Herman’s exit after two seasons seemed to confirm that the university, mockingly known as “Cougar High” for its commuter school reputation, was, at best, a stepping stone to bigger and better stages.
Athletic director Hunter Yurachek took me on a tour of the athletic facilities during my visit, trying to sell me on the idea of a dormant powerhouse. He told me it was only a matter of time before Houston got an invitation to the Big 12, 21 years since being left behind in the first devastating round of conference realignment. It was the kind of stuff Houstonians had heard for years: If only the Cougars could rejoin the big time, tap into the area’s deep reservoir of athletic talent, and build up some real fan support, the successes of the 1980s would be possible again.
Yurachek also showed me around the nearly 50-year-old Hofheinz Pavilion, the on-campus basketball arena, which was then a crumbling shell of itself. It was under a $60 million renovation, and he and Sampson—then in his fourth season as Cougars head coach—could envision the day when nationally ranked teams would play before a full house.
“There’s not a better facility in the country,” Yurachek told me. “Who wouldn’t want to play here?” I wondered whether he really believed that. Months later, Yurachek left Houston to take the same position at Arkansas, further lending credence to the idea that even the architects of Houston’s rebuild didn’t truly buy into the vision.
But then Sampson got things rolling the following spring. He led the Cougars to a 27-win season in 2017-18, earning their first tournament win in 34 years. He’s won 30 or more games in five of the past seven seasons, has finished first or tied for first in conference play for four straight years, and turned Houston into a powerhouse by the time it finally got the call to join the Big 12. His squads also produced three first-round NBA draft picks (Quentin Grimes, Jarace Walker, and Marcus Sasser) at a school that hadn’t previously had one since Greg “Cadillac” Anderson in 1987.
Sampson also snagged maybe the nation’s best recruiting class this winter, landing five-star power forward Chris Cenac Jr. and two four-star guards, Isiah Harwell and Kingston Flemings. It’s a recruiting class that’s largely unprecedented at Houston, considering that even Clyde Drexler chose the Cougars only over offers from schools like Texas Tech and New Mexico State.
2025 was supposed to be the year when it all came together. Houston had projected NBA draft picks in Joseph Tugler and Milos Uzan. It had solid backcourt scorers in Sharp and L.J. Cryer. And it had a rugged sixth-year forward in J’Wan Roberts, who does a little bit of everything.
In many ways, Roberts is the heart of the program that Sampson has built. He arrived at Houston as a 180-pound three-star recruit whose other best offers were from Washington State and St. John’s. He left as the winningest player in program history, a leader who helped the Cougars come through late against Duke in the Final Four. “Being in this moment, I feel like I was ready for it, I feel like I was built for it,” Roberts said after the game.
But even he could not get Houston all the way to the mountaintop.
The Cougars were the best and the worst of themselves on Monday night. They imposed their will for most of the game against the Gators, leading for all but 17 seconds in the first 39 minutes of action.
They forced star Florida guard Walter Clayton Jr. into one of his worst games of the season (11 points on 3-for-10 shooting and three turnovers), but they shot only 35 percent from the field themselves. They forced the Gators into 13 turnovers but then had turnovers on their last four possessions, including the final one, which could have tied or won the game.
Watching Florida storm onto the floor in celebration felt eerily familiar, a replay of the night 42 years ago when Valvano’s postgame elation marked my first real experience of sports heartache. It had been a long time since I’d believed that the Cougars could again reach the soaring heights of the early ’80s. But under Sampson, the program had proved that the heights of that glorious past are still possible—and that there’s still a possibility that the Cougars will someday claim the national title we’ve been waiting for. Sharp, a junior, is eligible to atone for his late-game failures next spring, and he’ll be flanked by a star-studded recruiting class with the potential to take over the sport.
The dream at Houston has always been recapturing—and one day even surpassing—the magic of Phi Slama Jama. This Cougars team came so close. But until the final seconds of the national championship break differently, Houston fans will have to keep holding on to just that: a dream.
