By Clay Horning
Kelvin Sampson may go down as the as the best men’s basketball coach Oklahoma’s has ever had. Not for me. He’s No. 2 and it isn’t close. But he might. It all depends on who’s writing the history and if it’s a Kelvin guy, well, it will be Kelvin.
Because if there’s one thing Sampson can do, it’s breed loyalty. And if there’s another, it’s win. And if there’s another, it’s win consistently. And if there’s another, well, frankly, it’s alienate so many whose loyalty he never bred.
Such a lightning rod, Sampson.
He’s leaving OU the winner of 279 basketball games.
That’s a lot of games. He went to the NCAA Tournament 11 of 12 seasons and that’s a lot of Madness. He won three straight Big 12 tournaments and if that’s not delivering excitement to your fans, nothing is.
He can coach.
No doubt.
But it was time for him to go.
No doubt.
Sampson will be reinvigorated at Indiana. He’ll make blue-collar lunch-pailers out of whatever he finds today at Bloomington and he’ll be a lot better than Mike Davis starting today. Because his kids will play hard and Hoosier fans are dying for a team that overachieves and Sampson will deliver it there.
Even after he quit delivering it here.
The coach who made his name by doing more with less, and maybe a couple of seasons by doing something with nothing, had started doing less with more; that is, as long as he could keep more from transferring.
Anybody who failed to see the issues facing, as Sampson so loved to call it, Sooner Basketball, had to be wearing blinders.
When your program becomes a turnstyle — Drew Lavender, Lawrence McKenzie, Larry Turner, Brandon Foust, De’Angelo Alexander — you have a problem.
When you return four starters from a team that won the Big 12 regular season championship and go seven consecutive games to end the season beating nobody by more than a point, you have a problem.
When the NCAA’s waiting in Park City, Utah, you have a problem.
Even Sampson’s perpetual backers were left shaking their heads after Wisconsin-Milwaukee made the Sooners look like Wisconsin-Appleton two weeks ago in Jacksonville.
Sampson’s last Sooner team fought nothing like his previous Sooner teams. And maybe that’s the sign nobody, Sampson most of all, can shake.
For everybody who never liked him in the first place for everything his team’s couldn’t do, he was putting a preseason top-10 team on the court that reflected little of what his teams had always done.
So it was time to leave.
Perhaps he’s arriving in Bloomington a happy man. Because for all his success, a pleased Sampson was so hard to find.
There were never enough people at his games. There was never enough positive press coverage, or enough press, period. There were days he would repeat his win-loss record over and over again in the same postgame press conference, like any of us didn’t already know.
You wondered where the chip on his shoulder came from. You wondered why he seemed so reluctant to enjoy his success.
One day, after winning one of those Big 12 tournaments, somebody asked him if everybody forgot about the Sooners. Talk about a question in his wheelhouse. Nobody ever respected OU enough.
Yeah, a lot of people forgot plenty about his team, Sampson said.
What did they forget?, I asked.
“I don’t know, Clay. Why don’t you answer that one.”
Apparently, I had forgotten something, too.
That was just Sampson being Sampson.
I hope he finds peace.
And I hope the Sooners find a coach who already has.
Clay Horning366-3526cfhorning@normantranscript.com
