Inside Houston’s Heartbreak and Love — Emanuel Sharp Tries To Blame Himself, His Teammates Hold Him Up and JoJo Tugler Vows To Get The Natty Next Year

SAN ANTONIO — Emanuel Sharp cannot even stand it hurts so much. He just crouches at the final devastating buzzer and is still crouching, slumped over, head down, hands on his head, elbows on his knees, when the blue and orange Florida confetti starts falling on top of him. Sharp’s University of Houston teammates will try and comfort him, suddenly feeling as helpless as the fans in the Alamodome stands. First Milos Uzan. Then Ja’Vier Francis for a long time, patting the No. 21 on Sharp’s back. refusing to leave his guy out there alone. Finally true freshman guard Mercy Miller, who gets Sharp to start a slow walk to the locker room.

This is the other side of March Madness, the gut-punch sadness. Only an Internet moron would try to blame Emanuel Sharp for Houston’s 65-63 loss to Florida in this national championship game. Unfortunately, there are plenty of those out there. But Sharp’s teammates know the real deal. And any real sports fan with anything resembling a heart does too.

Sharp hesitates under Florida pressure and doesn’t shoot the three on Houston’s last possession down two, dropping the basketball when he’s caught in-between, but it’s one play in a game full of chances. It doesn’t define Sharp who hit so many big shots all season — including the three that the UH players felt turn everything in that incredible comeback against Duke in this Final Four — to get Houston here. It doesn’t define this amazing Houston team either. One for the ages that comes up one play short after a season of making play after play after play when it mattered most.

“It was right there,” Mylik Wilson, the tough as nails stealth MVP of this special Houston team in many ways, says in the locker room. “It was so close.” An official NCAA Final Four towel covers most of Wilson’s tear-streaked, red-eyed face as he talks. But it can’t hide his heart or his endless want to.

“I just wanted to get it done for Coach Sampson,” Wilson tells PaperCity. “How hard he works. Nobody believes how hard he works. Especially at his age.”

Even the toughest team can’t guarantee its own happy ending. Not in this cruel tournament where it takes winning six straight single elimination games to walk away with the big trophy. Kelvin Sampson’s team won five and held a 12-point second half lead in the sixth.

“Late game execution, we’ve been really good at that,” Sampson says later, considering how his team executed so many of these late game situations so perfectly from December right through that semifinal against Duke Saturday night. “You go 10-0 on the road, that’s usually why you go 10-0 on the road. You know how to win close games.

“But tonight was a little uncharacteristic for us.”

If ever a team deserved a good last shot. . .

“It was right there. It was so close.” — UH senior guard Mylik Wilson

Kelvin Sampson’s Favorite Battlers

In the locker room afterwards, amid all the wailing tears and the collapsed bodies, Sampson tells them this might be his favorite team ever. A 35-5 group of battlers that somehow went undefeated on the road (under the strain of a 20-game Big 12 schedule) and didn’t lose a game by more than five points all year. That’s an astounding track record of never-give-in fight, everything one Kelvin Dale Sampson stands for come to life.

University of Houston fans will never see another team quite like this one. These Cougars aren’t national champions. But what they were is still something to treasure and tell the grandkids about. There isn’t a single currently projected 2025 first round NBA Draft pick on this Houston roster. And these Cougars took it all the way to the closing seconds of the national championship game.

You might not see a run quite like that ever again in college basketball. The Run It Back group that ran it right into the frantic final seconds of the last college basketball game of the season.

“The worst part about all this is I can’t do it with these guys again,” sixth-year senior forward J’Wan Roberts, one of the all-time great Coogs who belongs right up there with Phi Slama Jama, Jamal Shead and the rest of that pantheon, says. “I can’t run it back. I can’t wear this jersey and play with these guys again.”

Kelvin Sampson will have a much different team next season, a more talented team in many ways with five star incoming freshmen Chris Cenac Jr., Kingston Flemings and Isiah Harwell (not to mention the underrated Bryce Jackson) joining returners like JoJo Tugler and Terrance Arceneaux, who both tell PaperCity they plan to come back, and presumably the no-fear Emanuel Sharp and point guard Milos Uzan, who could both seek feedback from NBA teams in the draft process and still be able to return. It will be a taller, longer team with the 6-foot-10 Cenac (with the Cougar-approved 7-foot-3 wingspan) and Kalifa Sakho, a 6-foot-11 transfer portal addition from Sam Houston State.

“It’s going to push me to a higher level,” Tugler tells PaperCity of Florida 65, Houston 63. “(Kelvin Sampson) told me to keep my head up. He knows what he’s going to get out of me this summer. I’m ready for it.”

There is a reason Houston has opened as the 2026 national championship co-favorite with Duke from many of the oddsmakers who are paid to be right about such stuff.

But getting next season’s Houston team to have as much heart and never-say-die will as this one will be a herculean task. Even for Kelvin Sampson. Going through an entire college basketball season, 40 games, without once ever getting blown out. Without once losing by more than a few possessions. . . That just doesn’t happen. That’s the mark of the crazy competitive tone set by LJ Cryer and J’Wan Roberts, two of the biggest winners in recent college basketball history.

Emanuel Sharp, Ja’Vier Francis, Mylik Wilson and All Those Moments

This is a Houston team to remember, right down to this final game.

Ja’Vier Francis, the best backup center in America, rips off a ferocious poster slam that brings ooh and aahs out at the Alamodome worthy of Phi Slama Jama. Mylik Wilson, the defensive demon who sparks so much for this UH team, comes off the bench, gets a clean pickpocket steal and turns it into a layup. Soon Wilson is adding a high-flying slam on a rare Houston break off an Emanuel Sharp alley-oop and a 3-pointer that banks in off the side window.

There’s not a better story in college sports. And now Mylik Wilson is a Final Four playmaker. For all time. The final score can’t change that.

Sometimes the other team makes the comeback. Sometimes the other team has Walter Clayton Jr., the miraculous Florida guard who somehow finds a way to score 11 points in the second half and put up seven assists and five rebounds for the game with Sampson’s elite defense trying to double the ball out of his hands on almost every possession.

Houston’s own guards carried this team through so many wins. Sharp staggers to the locker room on this Monday night, but he’s soon held up with love.

“It ain’t his fault,” Roberts says firmly. “He came in the locker room and said he was sorry. But it ain’t his fault.

“We know how special Emanuel is. I’m going to comfort him as much as possible. And I’m going to defend his name if anyone tries to make it worse than what it is.”

Nothing ever came easy for Kelvin Sampson’s program. This wasn’t their Monday night. But you can bet they’ll keep coming to take more swings at it. Tugler wants to win one of these national championships even more with Sharp now.

“I told him I love him,” Tugler tells PaperCity. “I told him I love him. I told him we ain’t done. We’re going to grind and we’re going to get that thing next year.”

If anyone is built to handle this type of moment, it’s Sharp with two professional basketball player parents who always keep him in touch with reality. Heartbreak chose someone with one tough heart. Which doesn’t make the moment even easier. There are tears, red eyes and stunned looks behind the red-doored Houston locker room at the Alamodome. Later, there will be swears and slamming doors, the sounds of all that work suddenly wrenched away.

“The fact that they’re in there crying tells you how much they care,” Kelvin Sampson says. “I don’t want to coach a team that doesn’t cry. That means I’m recruiting the wrong dudes. The freshmen that didn’t even get to play are in there wailing.”

“I told him I love him. I told him I love him. I told him we ain’t done. We’re going to grind and we’re going to get that thing next year.” — UH forward JoJo Tugler on Emanuel Sharp

The 69-year-old Sampson looks like the strongest of them all after this loss. He got to coach on Monday night. This basketball lifer never expected a happy ending to be handed to him. He’s hurting for Cryer, Roberts, Francis and Wilson, the players who won’t get another shot at winning the last game of the college basketball season, the ultimate game. But he’ll be back to take another whack at it.

Going Out Having Setting a New Standard For UH Basketball

After Sampson tells his crying players how proud he is of this team, he lets each of those seniors say something to their teammates. Just because you don’t get the confetti finish doesn’t mean you still can’t go out together as ever.

“When you’re in that locker room and it doesn’t go your way, there’s a lot of emotions,” UH assistant coach K.C. Beard tells PaperCity. “You’re starting all the way back in June and thinking of all the conditioning. And then also the bonding and the moments that they shared. The wins at Kansas, at Arizona. Things that Coach had never done before. Wins in places that he had never won before.

“This team took the whole program to new heights. And again, I go back to, they allowed Coach to coach them. In a world where so many guys are transferring and you’re bringing in this and teams are really just one year teams. We were in a unique situation. We had guys who’d been here six years, three years, two years.

“So the friendships, the bonds, were deep. That’s why it hurts so much.”

It’s not the last shot that never happens. It’s the caring so much that brings you to your knees.