Randy Peterson
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April 08, 2025
Talk about the definition of a gut punch (pardon the cliché), but . . .
A team that’s built its reputation as being the most relentlessly aggressive outfit in college basketball, gets beat on one of those late-game situations that they’ve practiced all season to perfect. One of those plays they made so many times, while facing a plethora of Big 12 opponents against whom you make those types of close-game plays – or you lose.
You’d think that’d be way down the list of reasons for Houston to lose a game, not even getting off a shot against a desperate Florida defense, not once, but twice on the game’s final two possessions.
You know the rest of this Houston hard luck story – losing a national championship that it just as well could have won, after leading by 12 points with 16½ minutes remaining in one of the most physical games you’ll see.
One Shining Moment.
One Final Play.
One final opportunity for Houston coach Kelvin Sampson to finally win the Natty that had already eluded him twice? At 69 years old, and in an age of college sport’s transfer portal free agency, well, you just never know.
Gut punch.
I hope Sampson gets another chance – another opportunity that this time, ends with his team making the late-game play to win the game.
But you never know.
One more chance to make a play – and finally shut up people who didn’t jump on the Big 12 regular and postseason champ’s bandwagon, until the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee made the Cougars a No. 1 seed.
We’ve been warning you for weeks, some of us even longer, that college sports’ (alleged) national experts have been undervaluing Houston. They spewed how great Duke and Cooper Flagg are . . . how coach Jon Scheyer is working toward becoming the second-coming of Mike Krzyzewski … and how this version of Duke could be the greatest version of Duke in the history of blueblood basketball.
We’ve been trying to tell you since way before the team Sampson coaches so well, beat the Dukies in the Final Four’s semifinal . . . . and way before the Cougs lost a 65-63 heartbreaker at the Alamodome.
Gut punch.
**
Keep reading, before requesting my favorite beverage server to start charging double. You’ll get my point, eventually. And you’ll might even agree with it. So here we go:
What would college basketball life be like right now, if we’d had an SEC Final Four sweep? When it became evident that seven top seeds and one No. 2 would be our NCAA Tournament men’s and women’s finalists – I thought:
What the heck. Let’s see what happens if elite and entitled, in this case the SEC, would win both the women’s and the men’s tournament. And then after a week or so of the same “we’re the greatest” BS we’ve heard commissioner Greg Sankey infer – let’s see what happens when their world returns to whatever they call reality.
It obviously didn’t happen. Florida won the men’s, South Carolina couldn’t defend its 2024 women’s title, but let’s say both won.
What happens when SEC basketball coaches – like Auburn’s Bruce Pearl, Arkansas’ John Calipari, Florida’s Todd Golden, and Tennessee’s Rick Barnes, meet with Dawn Staley, South Carolina’s legendary coach, and the other successful women’s coaches in the conference. How’d you like to be a fly on that wall?
Regardless of their NCAA Tournament placing, if you don’t think basketball coaches aren’t going to be demanding a huge slice of the up to $20.5 million revenue share that NCAA schools likely can distribute in July, then you’ve not been paying attention.
It’s important that Sankey keep that handful of coaches as happy as he can – while also feeding the beast that is SEC football.
Anarchy?
That's not just an SEC scenario. It's something that could be happening right now in meeting rooms at all power conference schools.
“I’m going to scream to the top of my lungs for more of the percentage from somewhere,” Staley said in a recent story published in the Charlotte Observer. “If football gets 75%, then let’s talk about the 25% and how that’s divvied up, because we run a really good program, and we’re fiscally responsible when it comes to all of that and we want to stay that way.”
**
I write that, while watching Florida’s Golden tell whoever would listen:
“We guarded our butts off down the stretch. We made every 50-50 winning play.”
Especially the one that counted.
The last one.
“We've won a lot of games like that,” Sampson told reporters after the game. “Some nights we struggle offensively, but we usually find ways to win. Tonight, we didn't.”
Gut punch.
(Award-winning columnist Randy Peterson can be, and has been, reached at randypete4846@gmail.com or at any Okoboji-area beverage/food establishment between the hours of open and close.)