'Quitting is not part of the deal': How Houston's toughness allowed it to stun Duke

SAN ANTONIO -- On the day Jon Scheyer was born in 1987, Kelvin Sampson had just been hired as the head coach at Washington State. By then, he had already spent nearly a decade as an assistant at multiple stops.

All of the basketball games he had won and lost -- the games his teams had squandered and salvaged -- over a career that spans more than four decades taught him the lesson that saved Houston's season and led the program to its third national title game Monday night after a miraculous, come-from-behind win over Duke in the Final Four.

"We did a great job on all the other guys," Sampson said after Houston's 70-67 victory over the Blue Devils on Saturday. [Kon Knueppel], he made some tough 3s. Cooper Flagg, Cooper was not going to beat us by himself. I felt like if we could just hang in there, even when we were down 14. ... These guys will tell you what I was talking about in the huddle was, 'Just hang in there, hang in there.'"

Yes, there is a technical breakdown of what happened Saturday. Duke's botched inbounds play with 31.8 seconds to go led to a crucial turnover and dunk by Joseph Tugler. J'Wan Roberts and L.J. Cryer made big free throws. Flagg's controversial foul on Roberts mattered, too. And Duke's Hail Mary pass with 3.7 seconds to play -- by a team that built a regime off Christian Laettner's Hail Mary three decades ago -- fell short in the team's final attempt to avoid one of the worst collapses in Final Four history.

To many observers, Flagg's 3-pointer that gave Duke a nine-point edge in the final minutes had ended Houston's dreams. The Blue Devils had a 95.5% win probability after that shot with 3:03 left, according to ESPN Research. But Sampson's mantra persisted.

Just hang in there, hang in there.

Every coach in America touts their team's toughness. It's a cliche that lacks any tangible barometer, though. How do you measure a team's toughness? How does a team actually use it to win games? And how does one team acquire more of it than another?

The Cougars answered those questions at 5 a.m. on Thursday mornings just before the worst of the Texas heat arrived over the summer and long before the bright lights of San Antonio on Saturday tested all of that toughness talk. There, the Cougars would gather and go through intense workouts on VersaClimbers. There were no basketballs in sight. Just a bunch of exhausted players, chasing a target time while climbing imaginary stairs.

"We put in a lot of time early in the year," Milos Uzan said. "We feel like we put in a lot of work that not many programs in the country put in. When you go through some adversity early in the year, it builds your togetherness and it builds your bond. And we really do believe."

Just hang in there, hang in there.

The Cougars also found out how tough they were after last year's Sweet 16 loss to Duke did not sit well with Sampson. Key injuries had impacted that game but Sampson was more concerned about free throws (they were 9-for-17 that night). Following the loss, he demanded that every player on the roster shoot 150 free throws per night, a practice that continued through Tuesday. And if the grad assistant in charge of tracking those shots failed to slip a piece of paper with the nightly tallies underneath Sampson's office door each day, he'd have hell to pay. But it was on those evenings when Roberts -- who made clutch free throws late against Duke on Saturday -- prepared for the biggest moment of his career.

"I wasn't really nervous at all just because of the work that I put in, just believing in it and trusting myself," Robert said after the game. "I try not to get sidetracked by how big the stage is or the crowd getting into it. I just try to trust myself, focus on my routine, and trust my work."

But a matchup against Kansas earlier this year had forced Houston to dig deep and see if its claims about culture, heart and drive were real, too. With 10 seconds to play in that 92-86 overtime win against Kansas in January -- Sampson's first win at Allen Fieldhouse -- the Cougars were down by six points but managed to win. Sampson said he used that rally to encourage his squad on Saturday.

"Even when [Duke] went up 14, I thought we could play better," Sampson said. "I was just imploring our kids to stay with it. Just stay with it. Yeah, I brought up the Kansas game. I don't think I needed to. Our maturity on this team is pretty good."

Just hang in there, hang in there.

When Sampson preached resilience after Duke had seized that 14-point lead on Saturday with 8:17 to play, he was talking to a group of players who believed, not just because their coach told them to but because they had experienced it for themselves.

And now, Houston, which boasts the No. 1 defense in America, has lost one game since Nov. 30. That's more than four months of basketball with one blemish. But the Cougars had spent grueling summer days together to get ready for this run. They had been in the gym without any cameras or fans in the stands to get ready for this run. And they had, over the course of the season, been tested to get ready for this run, too.

Even in the NCAA tournament, both Gonzaga and Purdue had managed to challenge them in the final minutes before Duke seemed to have an insurmountable advantage on Saturday. But those circumstances did not intimidate Sampson or his team.

"Quitting is not part of the deal," he said. "We're not going to quit. We're just going to play better."

On Saturday night, Houston was just too tough, not just because they talk about it but because, under Sampson, they actually live it.

"We knew coming in that America had Duke picked," Uzan said. "As long as the people in the locker room believed, that's all that matters. We all believed."