Wildcats better be ready to rumble vs. Cougars
SAN ANTONIO — Villanova isn’t afraid to do what it calls “sleeping in the streets.” The question is if the Wildcats are willing to rumble there.
Technically, the hardwood floor of the AT&T Center is where a trip to the Final Four will be decided on Saturday evening. But the Houston Cougars, with their broad shoulders and sharpened elbows and boundless mettle, are going to drag the whole affair over the figurative curb and onto the proverbial asphalt.
And their East Coast adversaries already know full well what’s coming.
“We’re going to take a little smack in the mouth,” Villanova coach Jay Wright said Friday. “We’ll take it. But you get used to it.”
So far in this NCAA Tournament, that seems easier said than done. In the second round, Illinois absorbed a couple of blows from Houston and never recovered. Thursday in the Sweet 16, the Cougars’ bullying was so merciless that by the end of the night you almost felt sorry for top-seeded — and physically outmatched — Arizona.
Afterward, Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd mused that teams would be “better served if you play them a couple of times.” But in college basketball in March, nobody gets that opportunity. There’s little time to adjust.
And that’s one reason why Kelvin Sampson’s Cougars have gone from championship long shots two weeks ago to the current favorite, per Las Vegas oddsmakers, to win the whole thing.
As Sampson noted on Friday, quite forcefully, his program has little in common with the flash and style of the 1980s-era “Phi Slama Jama.” Modern-day Houston basketball is built with largely unheralded recruits who get in an opponent’s face a few seconds after the opening tip and then refuse to leave it.
“We always feel like the toughest team out there,” Houston guard Jamal Shead said, “and always try to play like it.”
The goal, as Sampson explained it, is to make the other team uncomfortable, and it works.
It worked even after the Cougars lost their top two players — Marcus Sasser and Tramon Walker — to season-ending injuries before Christmas.
It worked well enough not only to earn a third consecutive trip to the Sweet 16 for a program that had been mired in mediocrity before Sampson’s arrival eight years ago, but also well enough to limit Arizona’s heralded offense to 33.3 percent shooting.
And the Cougars are counting on it to work well enough to get back to a second consecutive Final Four, and maybe put an end to people talking about what a big deal Houston basketball used to be.
“Don’t live in another era,” Sampson said. “We are good.”
Of course, their opponent on Saturday has a pretty decent track record, too. Wright’s Wildcats have won two national titles in the past decade, including one in San Antonio in 2018, and with a convincing victory over Michigan on Thursday they showed they might be primed to win another.
As usual, Villanova launches plenty of 3-pointers, which fits into the time-honored team mantra of, “Shoot ’em up, sleep in the streets.”
The translation? Wright wants his players to be so committed to keep launching shots that they have to be willing to miss a bunch of them, to the point when, as he once explained, “no one’s going to let you come into their house. They’re going to make you sleep in the streets, you were so bad.”
The Wildcats tend not to be that bad, though. They made 9 of 30 3-point attempts against Michigan, which was a subpar night for them. Against the Cougars, they’ll probably need to be better, even if they insist they don’t mind getting into a slow-it-down slugfest.
“We’re just going to take whatever we see,” Villanova guard Collin Gillaspie said. “That could be fast, or it could be slow.”
Advanced statistics show the Wildcats actually played at an even slower pace than Houston did this season. But the Cougars’ relentless defense has a way of making that pace miserable even on those who don’t mind going possession-for-possession.
As Wright said, “You can’t simulate what they do.”
So after that first smack Saturday evening, when the game crosses the figurative curb?
Those inside the AT&T Center will see who gets used to it.