Emanuel Sharp losing the National Championship game for the Houston Cougars on a double dribble that he was not allowed to pick up is a cruel encapsulation of head coach Kelvin Sampson’s decade-long tenure with the program: being this close.
And they have been close, many times. It felt the closest it has ever been under the 69-year-olds when the Cougars were up by 12 points in the second half of the last game of the year. But it came crashing down, crowning the Florida Gators as your 2025 National Champions.
Gators coach Todd Golden, 39, is thirty years younger than Sampson. He’s got the basketball IQ of Sampson, but he also has youth, tons of energy, sharpness, and most importantly, a long runway to get back to the top of the mountain like he did this year.
That reality, whether they know it or not, was sitting in the back of the minds of many college basketball fans. And it poses the question: Was 2025 Sampson’s last chance to capture the fruits of his labor? To have the final stand, his body of work has so obviously commanded?
This is not to necessarily suggest that if Houston got a good break at the end of the game that Sampson would have felt content calling it a career. If someone does one thing for that long, it usually means they’re committed through the highs and lows and have stable relationship with the rush of satisfaction.
But you’d figured someone who’s been as close as he is for as long as he is would reach the top once.
Kelvin’s contract ends after the 2026-27 season. He signed an extension in June of 2023 that will earn him 3.7 million annually
“There’s a lot of teams that are not built for six straight wins,” Sampson said. “This team was, this team was built, this team had the character and the toughness and the leadership. This team was built to win this tournament, and that’s why it’s so disappointing. We got here and had a chance and just didn’t get it done.”
It’s not just Father Time. NIL and the transfer portal have made being a head coach a much more multilayered and exhausting task. It’s essentially two jobs in one: dealing with players at the basketball level while becoming more involved at a financial level. And even just getting to the latter requires a new set of terminology. That can be exhausting, and it set up Jim Larañega and Tony Bennett towards retirement, citing the fatigue of the new dawn of college basketball.
Kellen Sampson is the son of the head coach and an assistant coach on the staff. With his father’s future in discussions, he has immediately been pinned as a likely candidate to take over.