LAWRENCE, Kan. — With 51.5 seconds left in regulation, as Houston coach Kelvin Sampson called timeout after Kansas guard Rylan Griffen had buried a 3 to put the Jayhawks ahead by 4, Sampson’s wife Karen got out of her seat behind the Cougars’ bench, said goodbye to the nice Kansas fans who sat next to her and started walking around the concourse of Allen Fieldhouse.
The coach’s wife knows how these usually end.
It’s always Kansas that makes the miraculous play, the wild comeback, justifying the “Beware of the Phog” banner that hangs in the rafters. Once her husband led by 16 points in this building as the coach of Oklahoma. He lost that one. Sampson had coached eight times at Allen Fieldhouse, and he’d lost eight times.
But Saturday night, the ghosts got confused. The luck was on the side of the Cougars in their 92-86 double-overtime win to remain perfect in Big 12 play. How else do you explain that with 20 seconds left in the first overtime and Kansas ahead by 6 after LJ Cryer air-balled a corner 3 and Kansas sixth-year point guard Dajuan Harris rebounded the miss and headed to the line with 18.3 seconds left, Houston would be the one to win that game?
Houston center Joseph Tugler rebounded the miss and gave it to Milos Uzan, who dribbled to the far baseline, jumped and floated a pass to Emanuel Sharp. Sharp hurt his ankle Monday, missed Wednesday’s win against Utah and practiced Saturday morning for the first time all week. He caught the ball about 6 feet behind the 3-point line with Zeke Mayo inches away and fired a 3 up anyway. It went through the net with 7.5 seconds left, giving Houston just a sliver of hope.
The Cougars had already extended the game by not allowing Kansas to inbound the ball with 16.6 seconds left in regulation when Mayo ran the baseline trying to search for a teammate around the giant shadow of Tugler and his 7-foot-6 wingspan. Mayo was called for a 5-second violation, which gave the ball back to Houston and allowed J’Wan Roberts to send the game to overtime with two free throws.
Sampson let loose his bull again after that Sharp 3, with poor Mayo tasked again with trying to find someone to pass to.
This time Mayo, right as the official’s count hit four, tried to float a pass to Hunter Dickinson. Mayo didn’t put it high enough, and Uzan reached in the air and hit it away with his denial hand, the ball going right to sixth-year guard Mylik Wilson.
After Mayo’s half-court heave went left, Sharp sprinted onto the floor, made a beeline for Wilson and summed it up for everyone: “Oh, my God.”
In the second overtime, Sampson kept running plays to get the ball to sixth-year forward J’Wan Roberts at the left elbow, and he kept getting to his lefty hook. When Roberts got to Houston, he redshirted. His first season he averaged 1.4 field-goal attempts per game; the next year he averaged 2.1.
“Twenty-one shots is crazy!” Roberts said. “I’d had shot the ball 10 more times, because I trust myself and I trust the work I put in.”
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