Houston coach Kelvin Sampson cuts down the net as the team advances to the Final Four, Sunday, March 30, 2025, in Indianapolis. Raphael Fernandez/The Cougar
Before the season began, coach Kelvin Sampson made it clear: “The journey is more important than the destination.”
“If you aren’t inside the arena, you only care about the destination,” Sampson said. “For the coaches and players dedicating their lives to helping each other through this thing we call a basketball season, to be judged on just one game is pretty shallow. But it doesn’t bother us.”
Although the Houston Cougars fell just one win short of their first national title, they made a triumphant return to college basketball’s biggest stage, advancing to the national championship game for the first time in 41 years.
Houston appeared to have control over Florida, building a 12-point lead, but their dreams were sliced instead of the nets.
While red and white confetti didn’t rain down in the Alamodome, Guy V. Lewis Development Center is still due for its usual redecorating.
Houston earned a school-record 35 wins, a perfect 10-0 road record, and three different trophies to add to their collection.
The Cougars became a No. 1 seed for the third consecutive season after holding their own in the Big 12 Conference. They went 19-1 and became the first team in over a century to win the regular-season title in their first two seasons since Idaho in the Pacific Coast Conference.
“Don’t sleep on Houston,” Sampson said after the Cougars advanced to the championship game with a 14-point comeback against Duke. “We weren’t 34-4 playing in the toy poodle league.”
A last-second layup from graduate forward J’Wan Roberts that lifted Houston past UCF and a collective effort that helped the Cougars erase a six-point deficit in the final minute at Kansas in an eventual double overtime win served as dress rehearsals for their march to the finish.
The Cougars began their postseason climb by claiming the Big 12 tournament title for the first time in program history.
“Not this week, but this season has been about the Houston Cougars,” Big 12 commissioner Brett Yormack said as he handed Houston the Big 12 tournament trophy and ushered them into March Madness.
It was never about week-to-week performance; it was a season-long puzzle. Each month presented new challenges, requiring the Cougars to adjust and grow.
Houston showed off its No. 1 defense to advance to its second Final Four in five years, holding Tennessee to only 15 first-half points, the lowest first-half scoring total by any No. 1 or No. 2 seed in a tournament game since seeding began.
In the Sweet 16, Houston pulled off late-game magic, turning an inbound pass into a game-winning layup to defeat Purdue. The Cougars reached their sixth straight Sweet 16, the longest active run in the nation, after keeping Gonzaga from the round of 16 for the first time in nine years.
Before that, Houston’s first-round win came in the form of a 78-40 dismantling of Southern Illinois Edwardsville.
It wasn’t always expected to end this way. In November, Houston slipped outside the top 10 for the first time in two years after a 4-3 start. From the outside, questions swirled about the Cougars’ adjustment to a new point guard in junior Milos Uzan. But inside the locker room, those questions were answered long before the rest of the country caught on.
“I’m just proud of the way we fought all season,” graduate guard L.J. Cryer said. “We went through some adversity early, and people tried to kind of write us off a little bit, not expecting us to make it to this point. But we kept our heads down and kept grinding all season. We flipped it around.”
Even though the journey didn’t end at the Cougars’ ultimate dream destination, “The dream has been great,” Roberts said.
