LAWRENCE, Kan. — With 51.5 seconds left in regulation, as Houston coach Kelvin Sampson called timeout after Kansas guard Rylan Griffen had buried a 3 to put the Jayhawks ahead by 4, Sampson’s wife Karen got out of her seat behind the Cougars’ bench, said goodbye to the nice Kansas fans who sat next to her and started walking around the concourse of Allen Fieldhouse.
The coach’s wife knows how these usually end.
It’s always Kansas that makes the miraculous play, the wild comeback, justifying the “Beware of the Phog” banner that hangs in the rafters. Once her husband led by 16 points in this building as the coach of Oklahoma. He lost that one. Sampson had coached eight times at Allen Fieldhouse, and he’d lost eight times.
But Saturday night, the ghosts got confused. The luck was on the side of the Cougars in their 92-86 double-overtime win to remain perfect in Big 12 play. How else do you explain that with 20 seconds left in the first overtime and Kansas ahead by 6 after LJ Cryer air-balled a corner 3 and Kansas sixth-year point guard Dajuan Harris rebounded the miss and headed to the line with 18.3 seconds left, Houston would be the one to win that game?
In his first 72 games he played at Allen Fieldhouse, Harris had missed both free throws on a trip to the line…
