The Houston Cougars
The University of Houston Cougars have established a reputation as a basketball powerhouse with trips to the Sweet Sixteen in 2023 & 2024, the Elite Eight in 2022, and the Final Four in 2021. With a move from the American Athletic Conference (AAC) to the Big 12 in the 2023-2024 season, this program seems to be the best in the NCAA out of the state of Texas, under the control of living coaching legend Kelvin Sampson.
This is a fun team to watch, full of hoopers and hard nosed players that compete night in and night out. Undersized but lightning fast with a good feel for the tempo of the game and operating under a real “player’s coach”. That coach said in a recent press conference that the ’24-’25 Cougars just needed to “keep doing what we’ve been doing”.
A little less than halfway through this ’24-’25 season, the cougars sit at 10-3 with a pair of five point losses coming to a couple of now top 10 programs in (#2)Auburn and (#6)Alabama and a loss in Las Vegas to a dangerous San Diego State team in overtime on November 30th. Since then, this team has found their stride refining some weaknesses against some smaller programs and entering Big 12 conference play with a handling of Oklahoma State in Stillwater and a 31 point dismantling of BYU.
Much of their scoring relies on guard play with bigs scoring off of dump downs or offensive rebounds. L.J. Crier and Emmanuel Sharp lead the charge on this front at 14.6 and 14.0 points respectively. This opens up lanes for the other guards to tee off from three point range, which they do very well, at 41.4% as a team on the year.
This team will have the most dangerous backcourt in almost any competition they face this year, and, provided that they shoot well from downtown, they have a puncher’s chance against any team in the Big 12. As a team they shoot >75% from the free-throw line which despite their three close losses, would seem to hint at an advantage in the in-conference battles yet to come.
Big 12 and Post-Season Outlook
Although it lost the University of Oklahoma and University of Texas to the war-zone that is the SEC this past year, the Big 12 has four of the top 16 teams in the nation with every single one of the 16 members of the Big 12 having a winning record. What this tells me is that although there will be no nights off in conference play, the double-header schedule may be a deciding factor in how teams stack up when making pushes for high seeding come March.
With regards to the Houston Cougar squad, the last 5 games will be one hell of a challenge going into tournament play with four of those five games coming against teams currently ranked in the top 25 with a trip to Lubbock to take on Texas Tech being the outlier; no easy task to say the least.
The Big 12 will likely send at least six teams to the NCAA tournament, and this Houston team is skilled enough and experienced enough to make another push deep into the post-season. This particular rendition of the Houston Cougars has bought into the hard-nosed culture the Coach Sampson brings and will be a dangerous team to run into. In a way, they become more dangerous if they fall to a lower seed and start playing loose and confident.
Houston takes on the TCU Horned Frogs tomorrow, January 6th at the Fertitta Center in Houston at 8pm. The Horned Frogs have struggled with high level competition this year but are riding the momentum of a conference win against Kansas State on January 4th. The contest will be available on ESPN2 as both teams look to continue their streaks in conference play.
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