Kansas is coming off a big win over Houston on Monday night. It was a match-up between two amazing coaches. Bill Self was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017. Now, Houston coach Kelvin Sampson is a nominee for the Hall of Fame.
After the game between the two, the Kansas coach gave his take on the Hall of Fame candidacy of Sampson, per Chris Baldwin of Paper City Magazine.
“I’m not an expert on judging except I do know this. There’s not a better ball coach in America than Kelvin Sampson,” Self said. “You don’t have to be in the Hall to be one of the best. There’s a lot of great coaches that aren’t, but certainly if he’s a finalist, I hope he gets in because he’s terrific.”
The longtime coach has built a Hall of Fame career. His coaching career began as an assistant at Michigan State before becoming the head coach at Montana Tech in 1981. Since then, he has spent time with Washington State, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Houston at the college level. He has also been an NBA assistant with the Milwaukee Bucks and Houston Rockets.
As a college head coach, he has been named the AP Coach of the Year twice, along with a four-time AAC Coach of the Year and two-time Big 12 Coach of the Year. Further, he has been to the Final Four three times, won nine regular-season conference titles, and nine conference tournament titles. He has also won 821 games as a college coach.
When speaking of the recent losing streak and the Houston loss to Kansas, Sampson inadvertently made his own case for the Hall.
“This is all behind us now. We lick our wounds. We haven’t been through anything like this because we’ve been the winningest program in America for how many years. This is a great life lesson for everybody. When we play these good teams you’ve got to be on top of your game and we weren’t,” Samson said after the contest.
Since the start of the decade, no team has won more games than Houston. For all the accolades, Sampson is still missing two big marks on his resume: National Champion and Hall of Fame.
