SAN ANTONIO — Nearly an hour after Houston coach Kelvin Sampson walked off the court amid flurries of Florida-colored orange and blue confetti, he stood in front of a black curtain in a hallway at the Alamodome.
Sampson, 69, faced a phalanx of television lights that illuminated him at his most crushing professional low. The lights shined on his close-cropped hair, which is more salt than pepper, as midnight quickly approached.
With his arms folded across his chest and an NCAA National Final pin adjacent to the UH logo on his gray polo, Sampson distilled the disappointment of Houston squandering a 12-point lead in the second half and ending the national title game with four consecutive turnovers in a 65-63 loss to Florida.
“There’s a lot of teams that are not built for six straight wins,” Sampson said, referring to the number needed to win the NCAA tournament. “This team was, this team was built, this team had the character and the toughness and the leadership. This team was built to win this tournament, and that’s why it’s so disappointing. We got here and had a chance and just didn’t get it done.”
The scene unfolded as the inverse of Houston’s stunning comeback win over Duke in the national semifinal. On Monday, the Cougars wilted in the final minute, somehow not having a ball touch the rim on the final three possessions.
Nearly 48 hours after scoring the game’s last nine points in 33 seconds to stun the Blue Devils on Saturday, Houston managed to lose a game it controlled throughout and trailed for only 63 seconds.
Florida’s first lead in the second half came with 46 seconds remaining. Sampson called it “incomprehensible” that the Cougars couldn’t get a shot off on the final two possessions, as Houston closed the game with back-to-back turnovers by star guard Emanuel Sharp.
Florida mustered the third-biggest comeback in NCAA title game history, and that left the Houston locker room a mirror image of the devastation it had wrought two nights earlier.
On Monday night, as reporters entered that locker room, Cougars guard Milos Uzan escorted Sharp away from the media. Sharp wore a towel over his head as he walked away, and he could be heard wailing as Uzan attempted to console him.
“That’s me, bro,” Sharp was overheard saying. He then screamed an expletive, accentuating the consonants.
An intermittently flushing toilet occasionally cut through the awkward interviews in the quiet locker room. Houston’s Joseph Tugler summed up the devastation simply: “That broke everybody’s heart.”
Sharp’s pain stemmed from the back-to-back possessions to end the game, his only two turnovers, which Sampson termed “a couple tough possessions decisionwise.”
With Houston facing its first deficit of the half in the final minute, Sharp drove to the basket with nearly 30 seconds remaining and got stripped by Florida’s Will Richard, who was a help defender. Richard essentially forced Sharp to kick the ball out of bounds with 26 seconds left.
After Florida’s Denzel Aberdeen made one of two free throws, Houston had the ball down two with 19 seconds left. Florida’s defense stymied Houston’s early offensive action, then Sharp caught the ball nearly 6 feet behind the 3-point line with five seconds remaining.
Sharp went straight up to attempt a long 3-pointer, but what would have been a 28-footer never got off. Walter Clayton Jr. sniffed out his desperation and lunged at him midair with an outstretched left hand, and it put Sharp in the unenviable position of getting his shot blocked or letting the ball drop.
Sharp shielded Clayton as the ball hit the floor, and Florida’s Alex Condon made the hustle play to seal the game by snagging his fourth steal of the night. Sharp slumped down a few feet from his final turnover, his elbows perched atop his knees and fists covering his face as he looked toward the floor.
“I told him I loved him,” Sampson said when asked what he told Sharp. “I told him I loved him, and I really focused on the job he did on Clayton. He did an awesome job on him. He made a couple reads that I’m sure he wish he’d had over, but we don’t get there without that kid.”
Sharp played gritty defense on Clayton as Houston’s primary defender on the Florida guard. Clayton finished with 11 points on 3-for-10 shooting, taking more than 32 minutes to score a field goal.
Sampson hoped that Sharp would have shot-faked and gotten into the paint. But instead, Clayton lunged at Sharp with his left arm extended, and the contest froze Sharp. It made for an unusual key play to win the game, as more than 20 years after Syracuse’s Hakim Warrick delivered the biggest blocked shot in NCAA tournament history to beat Kansas, Clayton will have the most replayed contest.
The other two Houston miscues to close the game included one turnover off an offensive rebound by Tugler and another on a baseline drive to nowhere by L.J. Cryer that culminated when Cryer essentially flipped the ball into Condon’s chest in the paint.
Cryer summed up the overall tenor of missed opportunity this way: “It was definitely there for the taking.”
A win would have marked Sampson’s 800th career victory and his first national title and likely would have pushed him to the Basketball Hall of Fame on the first ballot. Instead, he hustled off the court in disbelief after the handshake line. Sampson’s daughter, Lauren, ran to him in the tunnel and hugged him. “I’m OK,” he told her.
As Houston’s assistant coaches sat in their locker room and stared into space, assistant Kellen Sampson, the coach’s son, summed up the fickle bounces of the tournament’s fate this way.
“It’s a brutal, cruel guillotine,” he said, “and when you get here, every team is so good and you don’t get here without a team that’s connected, resilient, tough. The margins are so razor-thin. We certainly did enough tonight to win. Florida did, as well, and they won.”
