Kelvin Sampson’s Indiana exit and Houston rise, explained for national championship

Kelvin Sampson will lead his Houston Cougars into the national championship game on Monday night in the culmination of a legendary head coaching career. The 69-year-old Sampson is also one of college basketball’s greatest comeback stories, and not just because the Cougars wiped away a 14-point second-half deficit to stun Duke in the 2025 men’s Final Four.

It’s easy to watch Houston play and think Sampson is doing it the right way. The Cougars have the No. 1 defense in the country this season, as they often have under Sampson’s leadership. They play tough, disciplined, organized basketball without a five-star recruit or projected NBA first-round pick on the roster. Houston picked up a couple players from the transfer portal, but for the most part Sampson has nourished this roster with tough love over five or even six years for some players. He’s an old school making it work in college basketball’s chaotic new era.

Narratives change over time, and they certainly have for Sampson. For much of his career, Sampson’s reputation was that of a college basketball outlaw, and not in a good way. Sampson was a cheater, a rule-breaker, a scoundrel. The NCAA was on his back as head coach of the Oklahoma Sooners in the early-to-mid ‘00s, and their heat eventually caused him to lose his dream job with the Indiana Hoosiers.

Sampson was forced to resign from Indiana on Feb. 22, 2008, in the middle of a fantastic season. He was hit with NCAA punishments, and didn’t coach in college basketball again until he was hired by Houston in 2014. The Cougars were considered one of the worst jobs in college basketball when he took over the program. Ever since, Houston has been rising, while Indiana remains stuck as one of the most disappointing programs in the sport.

With Houston in the national championship game, let’s look back on Sampson’s controversies and how he came out on the other side as one of the most respected coaches of his era.

Kelvin Sampson’s coaching rise and start of controversies

Sampson got his start as a graduate assistant at Michigan State in 1979 under legendary head coach Jud Heathcote. He took an assistant job at Montana Tech one year later, and eventually became the program’s head coach in 1985. He left to take an assistant job at Washington State, and became Wazzu’s head coach in 1987.

Sampson took Washington State to the NCAA tournament in his final year with the team in 1994. He was hired by Oklahoma as head coach, where he remained for 12 seasons. Sampson took the Sooners to the NCAA tournament 11 times over that period, including a trip to the 2002 Final Four, where they were defeated by Indiana.

At Oklahoma, Sampson was put under NCAA investigation for recruiting violations stemming for allegedly making hundreds of impermissible phone calls to prospects. The NCAA said he couldn’t make phone calls for a year, or do off-campus recruiting visits. That’s about the time that Sampson jumped to Indiana in an attempt to restore the Hoosiers to glory seven years after the Bob Knight era ended.

Why Kelvin Sampson was fired at Indiana

Sampson was still on probation from the NCAA when took accepted the Indiana job. His first year with the Hoosiers saw the team go 21-11 and win a game in the NCAA tournament. Along the way, the head coach was hitting the recruiting trail hard, with a focus on five-star guard Eric Gordon. Gordon was verbally committed to Illinois, but Sampson’s recruitment of him to Indiana never stopped. Gordon eventually flipped to the Hoosiers.

The NCAA took another look at Sampson, and decided he committed four major violations that stemmed from impermissible phone calls to recruits. Sampson accepted a $750K buyout to leave the program. The NCAA effectively banned him for the next five years by hitting him with a show-cause penalty.

The NCAA reportedly came down hard on Sampson because it determined he lied to officials. Here’s what Andy Katz wrote at the time in 2008:

The most serious charge against Sampson was that he provided false information to NCAA enforcement staff members and Indiana compliance officers, something the coach has denied. The investigation began in July 2007, a little more than a year after he was hired away from Oklahoma. Once the president of the National Association of Basketball Coaches at a time when the NABC held an ethics summit in Chicago following a string of high-profile NCAA cases, Sampson was not allowed to send text messages to or call recruits when he first arrived at Indiana.

Sampson essentially couldn’t work in college basketball with the show-cause penalty hanging over him. He jumped to the NBA, starting with an advisory role with the Spurs under Gregg Popovich, followed by an assistant job with the Milwaukee Bucks under Scott Skiles, followed by an assistant job with the Houston Rockets.

Sampson thought he was getting the Rockets head coaching job, but the franchise hired Kevin McHale instead. In 2014, Sampson returned to college basketball by accepting the Houston job.

Kelvin Sampson completely turned around Houston

Houston has a proud basketball tradition that included three straight Final Four appearances in the early ‘80s on rosters led by Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler. The program had fallen on hard times before it hired Sampson, though, with only one NCAA tournament appearance in the previous 22 years on the day he was introduced.

Houston was considered a bad job mostly because its facilities needed a big upgrade. It came together slowly but surely after hiring Sampson as head coach.

Sampson missed the NCAA tournament in his first three years at Houston. He’s been cooking ever since. The Cougars’ first tournament run ended in the round of 32 to Michigan when Jordan Poole hit an unforgettable deep buzzer-beater. Houston has made it out of the first weekend of the tournament every year since.

Sampson got Houston to the Final Four in 2021 on a team led by Quentin Grimes. He followed with an Elite Eight run and two Sweet 16 runs. Now, the Cougars are playing for the national championship after their stunning comeback over Duke.

Eric Gordon put out this tweet when Houston reached the national championship game.

Sampson’s reputation has done a full 180 just months away from his 70th birthday. The NCAA rules he broke have long since been wiped away from the sport. In a new era of college basketball, an old-school coach is thriving on his own terms, and this time it has nothing to do with making extra phone calls.