No. 2 Houston leans on its defense to shut down No. 17 BYU and return to Big 12 title game

By Canadian Press on March 14, 2025.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Houston was forced to play BYU in the Big 12 Tournament semifinals without injured big man J’Wan Roberts.

Turns out the second-ranked Cougars still had plenty of guys capable of playing some defense.

Whether it was Big 12 player of the year LJ Cryer making life miserable for BYU guard Richie Saunders, or the length of Milos Uzan disrupting passes on the perimeter, coach Kelvin Sampson’s team simply shut down a bunch from Provo, Utah, that had set a Big 12 Tournament record with 18 3-pointers and piled up 96 points in a quarterfinal win over Iowa State.

The result was Friday night’s 76-56 rout — one not all dissimilar from Houston’s 86-55 romp past BYU in January — that sent a hard-nosed team that seems to embody its tough-minded coach to its second consecutive Big 12 championship game.

“The difference in our best defensive wins, whether it was Arizona or Kansas or West Virginia, it was our defensive discipline,” Sampson said. “I thought our defensive discipline was outstanding tonight.”

Sampson did not provide an update on Roberts, other than to say “we’ll just plug somebody else in,” but it appeared unlikely that he will play against the Texas Tech-Arizona winner in Saturday night’s title game. The bigger question is whether Houston’s leading rebounder and one of its veteran leaders will be ready for the start of next week’s NCAA Tournament.

“We’re used to having guys out with injury the last few years,” Sampson said.

Houston forced BYU into missing its first nine shots, seven of them from beyond the arc, where coach Kevin Young’s team had dazzled just 24 hours earlier. Whenever his guards tried to set up a play at the top of the key, Houston was there with lightning-quick double teams, which disrupted any sort of offensive flow and ultimately led to 13 turnovers.

The result was a 15-0 lead by the time seven minutes had passed, and BYU spent the next 33 trying in vain to catch up.

That’s hard to do against the nation’s No. 1 team in defensive efficiency.

“Our defense is our defense, the way we rebound, the way we do things,” Sampson said. “We’ve been doing this for a long time — this is our however-many-years going to these tournaments. But our first-half defense was outstanding.”

It’s not as though Houston does something exotic or unique on defense, either. It just plays that much harder than anyone else.

“The thing they do really well is multiple efforts,” Young offered, when asked why Houston’s defense is so tough. “They take one thing away, you think you have them on a swing-swing or something like that, and they do a great job of continuing to play with multiple efforts. And that’s a credit to their team to get that done on a nightly basis.”

What might have been a harbinger of BYU’s coming frustration came in the opening minutes, when Houston forced Egor Emin to toss up a 3-pointer that wedged between the backboard and rim. BYU kept possession with the jump ball, and Houston promptly forced Trevin Knell to toss up another contested 3 — that also got wedged between the backboard and the iron.

It was that kind of night for BYU, which shot 31.7% from the field and finished 6 of 28 from beyond the 3-point arc.

“We couldn’t throw it in the ocean to start the game, and 3 of 16 from 3 in the first half, which is unlike us. That kind of put us in mud,” Young said. “But look, Houston is a really good team. They lost one game in the conference for a reason.

“Coach Sampson knows what he’s doing, obviously, so you have to give them all the credit.”

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Dave Skretta, The Associated Press

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