LAWRENCE, Kan. — With 51.5 seconds left in regulation Saturday night at Allen Fieldhouse after Kansas guard Rylan Griffen had buried a 3 to put the Jayhawks ahead by 4 and right as Kelvin Sampson called timeout, his wife, Karen, got out of her seat behind Houston’s bench, said goodbye to the nice Kansas fans who sat next to her and started walking around the concourse of the old building.
The Houston coach’s wife knows how these usually end.
It’s always Kansas that makes the miraculous play, the wild comeback, justifies the “Beware of the Phog” banner that hangs in the rafters. Once her husband led by 16 points as the coach at Oklahoma in this building. He lost that one. Sampson had coached eight times at Allen Fieldhouse, and he’d lost eight times.
But Saturday night, the ghosts got confused. The luck was on the side of the Cougars. How else do you explain that with 20 seconds left in the first overtime and Kansas ahead by 6 after LJ Cryer air-balled a corner 3 and Kansas sixth-year point guard Dajuan Harris rebounded the miss and headed to the line with 18.3 seconds left, Houston would be the one to win that game?
In his first 72 games he played at Allen Fieldhouse, Harris had gone to the line and missed both free throws once. According to Ken Pomeroy’s calculations, Houston had a 0.4 percent chance to win at that point, which seems a little high.
Harris missed both free throws.
Houston center Joseph Tugler rebounded the miss and gave it to Milos Uzan, who dribbled to the far baseline, jumped in the air and floated a pass to Emanuel Sharp. Sharp hurt his ankle Monday, missed Wednesday’s win against Utah and practiced Saturday morning for the first time all week. He caught the ball about 6 feet behind the 3-point line with Zeke Mayo inches away, and he fired a 3 up anyway. It went through the net with 7.5 seconds left, giving Houston just a sliver of hope.
The Cougars had already extended the game by not allowing Kansas to inbound the ball with 16.6 seconds left in regulation when Mayo ran the baseline trying to search for a teammate around the giant shadow of Tugler and his 7-foot-6 wingspan. Mayo was called for a 5-second violation, which gave the ball back to Houston and allowed J’Wan Roberts to send the game to overtime with two free throws.
“Jojo is like a big ol’ bull that’s snorting at you and stomping his hooves and whipping his tail around,” Sampson said. “I mean, he’s a factor.”
Sampson let loose his bull again after that Sharp 3, with poor Mayo tasked again with trying to find someone to pass to around him.
This time Mayo, right as the official’s count hit four, tried to float a pass to Hunter Dickinson. Mayo didn’t put it high enough, and Uzan reached in the air and hit it away with his denial hand, the ball going right to sixth-year guard Mylik Wilson. Wilson started his career at Louisiana, then transferred to Texas Tech where it made him a defensive specialist. He left after one season in Lubbock and transferred to Houston. “He didn’t have any confidence,” said Houston assistant Anthony Goldwire, who was an intern four years ago at Louisiana in Wilson’s final season there.
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Wilson redshirted his first year at Houston, playing only in the staff pickup games on game days.
Wednesday against Utah, he took a season-high 11 field goal attempts. He made his two dunks, but he missed all nine jumpers. Every morning he shoots with Goldwire, and Friday morning, Wilson took an extra hour of shots. The work paid off early Saturday night. Wilson got in a zone in the first half and kept Houston within 7 at halftime by scoring 9 points on a perfect 4-of-4 shooting. When the ball landed in his hands with 7.5 seconds, he had already matched the most points he’d ever scored (15) for the Cougars. Wilson had made just eight 3s all season coming into the night, but without hesitation, he took one dribble back with his left hand to make sure he was behind the line and made the biggest shot of his life, tying the score with 4.3 seconds left.
“It’s been a crazy journey,” Wilson said after. “I stayed in the gym, kept working year after and year, and now it’s here. I’m here.”
After Mayo’s half-court heave went left, Sharp sprinted onto the floor, made a beeline for Wilson and summed it up for all of us.
“Oh, my God.”
In the second overtime, Sampson kept running plays to get the ball to sixth-year forward J’Wan Roberts at the left elbow and he kept getting to his lefty hook. When Roberts got to Houston, he redshirted. His first season he averaged 1.4 field-goal attempts per game; the next year he averaged 2.1.
“We had a lot of shooters that I played with — Quentin Grimes, Marcus (Sasser), Caleb (Mills), Tramon (Mark) — I just let them do their thing and I just try to find different ways to score and impact winning,” Roberts said. “When I wasn’t the first or second option, I just got the ball off the rim and scored that way.”
Sampson says Roberts didn’t have that hook shot when he arrived. “He’s lying,” Roberts said, with a big grin. “I worked on it, and it got way better.”
But Roberts certainly wasn’t anyone you’d ever imagine was going to be the focal point of the Houston offense. Now, in his sixth year at Houston, that’s exactly what he’s become. When smaller defenders guard Roberts, Sampson runs his offense through Roberts in the post. And against bigger guys, it’s trying to get him downhill where he can rise up and bank in those sweet lefty hooks. Roberts kept trading blows with KU bigs Dickinson and Flory Bidunga, the combination that nearly won Kansas the game multiple times, but Roberts and the Cougars had a few more swings left in them.
And the man who used to only shoot off offensive rebounds took a career-high 21 shots and scored a career-high 24 points, including 9 in the second overtime.
“Twenty-one shots is crazy!” Roberts said. “I’d had shot the ball 10 more times, because I trust myself and I trust the work I put in.”
Karen Sampson eventually wandered back when it was apparent that her 69-year-old husband was about to scratch off a bucket list item and win at Allen Fieldhouse. She took a picture of the scoreboard so she’d have documentation that, that really just happened.
Houston 92, Kansas 86.
(Photo of Hunter Dickinson and J’Wan Roberts: Ed Zurga / Getty Images)
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