Since making their move to the Big 12 official last season, Kelvin Sampson and the Houston Cougars are 32-5 in conference play, proving that the leaps from Conference USA to AAC to Big 12 were not too big for the Coogs to handle. And on Saturday afternoon, Houston took one more step toward a second consecutive regular season title, scoring a 68-59 win over the Iowa State Cyclones at the Fertitta Center.
Now anyone on the Iowa State side of things will be quick to point out that the Cyclones were without their two leading scorers, Curtis Jones and Keshon Gilbert, but Kelvin Sampson doesn’t want to hear any excuses. In the Big 12, one of the best conferences in the country, every victory is tough to come by, and the Cougars have racked up more of them in the last two years than anybody else. This year, Houston is 15-1 in Big 12 play and Sampson made sure to remind everyone of that in his postgame comments.
“Hey, look, man, we’re 15-1. We’re 15-1. That’s not, let’s not sit here and slice and dice being 15-1,” Sampson said, per ESPN News Services. “When you’re missing players, they just find a way to compete. We got up, I think, what was our biggest lead in the second half? 16? Yeah, and they come bang a couple of threes and it goes from 16 to 10. We just, we made some big shots too.”
Nobody on the Cougars made more big shots on Saturday afternoon than LJ Cryer, who scored a game-high 28 points on 11-for-17 shooting. Cryer echoed his coach’s sentiment, and instead focused on the fact that after losing to Iowa State twice last season — once in the Big 12 Championship Game — Houston was hell-bent on exacting some revenge, regardless of who was or wasn’t suiting up for the Cyclones.
“If they were there, I mean, they weren’t there and that’s out of our control at the end of the day,” Cryer said of the short-handed Cyclones. “We knew last year that they beat us twice while we only won one time, so going into the game, we kind of kept that in mind and we had to get that bad taste out our mouth.”
I guess we can consider this win a nice and thorough cleaning thanks a tube of Colgate and an Oral-B toothbrush.
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