Sampson Settles Into Familiar Territory
From his elevated seat at the head table, Kelvin Sampson eyeballed the assembled hyenas of the media and was almost startled to spy Bill Frieder among them.
“Coach Frieder,” Sampson baited. “Any questions?”
The tag around his neck this weekend claims that Bill Frieder is working the NCAA first and second-round tournament games for CBS radio. But not long ago he coached basketball up the road at Arizona State - which once a year obligated him to bring his team to Pullman, Wash., to do battle with Sampson and the Washington State Cougars.
“Until Bill said Pullman was a dump - remember that Bill?” Sampson said. “I just remembered that.” Responded Frieder, “I already turned a game down there this year.”
For only the second time since he left Pullman to become the head coach at the University of Oklahoma, Kelvin Sampson was back in a Pac-10 arena on Wednesday. His Sooners - ranked 12th and seeded third in the West Region - are first out of the gate here today against Winthrop at 10:40 a.m. local time, which means the pre-game meal might just be the mint the maid leaves on their pillow.
“Breakfast at 6:30,” he said. “You’re welcome to join us.”
This is not the way Sampson would have drawn it up after playing Friday night, Saturday afternoon and Sunday afternoon in the ferocious Big 12 Tournament (“I’ll take the late game Friday if I get to pick,” he offered), but it he was hardly in a sulk about it.
Six years he’s been at Oklahoma, and six years Sampson has spent the third weekend in March holding forth for the press in front of a blue NCAA banner. That the Sooners reached the Sweet 16 last year was a special bonus “because this year nobody’s asked me why we haven’t won a game yet.”
And with every trip to the NCAAs, it’s just another validation of Sampson’s decision to leave a program on the rise at WSU - which his successor, alas, took barely two years to turn into a footwipe.
“You know, I thought our best days were ahead of us at WSU,” Sampson said. “The team coming back - Donminic Ellison, Ike Fontaine, Mark Hendrickson, Nate Erdmann - was better than the team I inherited at Oklahoma. Even though that (Oklahoma) team won 23 games and made the (NCAAs), the team I left had better players.
“But the question I had to ask myself was, on a consistent basis, where do I have the best chance to win a national championship? That was the big picture.”
The big picture has a sharp focus. At Oklahoma, Sampson once coached a team into the NCAAs that finished sixth in its league; at WSU, he couldn’t do it until the Cougars clawed their way to fourth.
“One year, when we were still the Big Eight, we have five teams go - that’s more than half,” he said. “That’s a great advantage. It also gives you the opportunity to get big wins late in the season against ranked teams and shoot your RPI up.”
It can also carve you up, and frankly some people - though not Sampson - may have expected a little of that this season. The 1999 Sooners won 22 games, but graduated three starters (two of them all-league players) and saw forward Ryan Humphrey transfer.
“But at programs with tradition,” Sampson mused, “I don’t know if you’re allowed to rebuild.”
So he brought in freshman point guard Hollis Price, one of the top 50 recruits in the nation. J.R. Raymond, who sat out last year as a partial qualifier, came off knee surgery to blossom into OU’s best 3-point threat, and a nasty slasher named Nolan Johnson arrived after getting his transcript in order at a junior college. Sampson plugged in bullish Renzi Stone in the middle, and then turned dumped the mix in the lap of senior Eduardo Najera, who is not only one of the best players in college basketball but a hero to an entire nation, his native Mexico.
Remarkably, the Sooners won 14 of their first 15 games and 26 as of today. Of the six losses, only Colorado isn’t in the NCAAs - though the Buffs are in the NIT.
“We have a good team, but not a dominant or great team,” Sampson insisted. “But we’re a team that knows how to win. That’s something we’re good at.
“But, frankly, I didn’t see us 26-6. I wouldn’t have anticipated that with all the players. We’ve learned how to compete. There’s a big difference between playing hard and competing. Lots of teams that play hard will watch us on TV (today).”
After he nailed Bill Frieder and before he said anything else on Wednesday, Kelvin Sampson allowed that he was “thrilled to be here” and that he “never loses sight of how difficult it is to get here.”
From OU, yes, but even more so from WSU.
“When I was 31 years old and coaching at WSU, I didn’t know if I was on foot or horseback,” he said. “But I remember playing Ralph Miller’s team at Oregon State. I saw Gary Payton and that kid from Seattle, Willie Brantley. Ralph always had a great point guard and great wings and that formed a lot of my recruiting philosophy.
“At WSU, I could never get a great big man - some people say I can’t at Oklahoma, either. But you learn to recruit what you can and build around that. So I always tried to get great guards. And if you look at our record at WSU, the last four years we won because of great guards. So I learned a lot from coach Miller. I looked at what he did in Corvallis and wondered why we couldn’t do that in Pullman.
“Those were good days.”
He wouldn’t necessarily call these better. Except maybe in March.