'I love it': Texas Tech basketball, Houston coaches know the Big 12 is anything but easy
HOUSTON — Two coaches walked into the Jim Nantz Media Center in the bowels of the Fertitta Center on Wednesday night.
One of them, Grant McCasland, just suffered the worst loss of his tenure as Texas Tech basketball coach. His 25th-ranked Red Raiders got blitzed on both sides of the ball and lost 77-54, the team's first setback since Nov. 30.
The other, Kelvin Sampson, was minutes off from seeing his fifth-ranked Houston Cougars snap a two-game skid in front of the home crowd, went more than 20 minutes between turnovers and got a career-high 29 points from his "culture leader" Jamal Shead.
Knowing the context of the situation is important, because it would've been hard to tell which coach was on either side of the 23-point affair inside the room named after the man who made "Hello, friends," a calling card.
Sampson and McCasland are both in their first year in this version of the Big 12. Each has been in the league before with other schools at previous points of their careers. Sampson's been at Houston 10 years, McCasland in his first at Texas Tech.
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Yet even with the age and experience gap, they both had the same thought process to Wednesday's game, and life in the Big 12 as a whole.
"This league is brutal, man," Sampson said
Sampson spoke from experience of how people can react to setbacks. Houston (15-2, 2-2) was coming off back-to-back single-digit losses on the road before Wednesday's game. He lamented someone asking what was wrong with his team after the TCU loss, and how he knows the same question will be asked about the Red Raiders (14-3, 3-1)
"It's the road in the Big 12," Sampson said. "Teams lose. Good teams lose on the road in the Big 12. And good teams win at home in the Big 12. ... When you're an old coach like me, you learn never to overreact."
McCasland addressed similar questions after the loss, though nothing that direct. He spoke of the Cougars owning a 40-8 advantage in points in the paint, Texas Tech's 14 turnovers (the team's highest total in the last six games) and fatigue — in part because of Houston's determination and physicality on defense — preventing the Red Raiders from making another comeback.
But McCasland still ended the night with a smile on his face.
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Of course he wasn't thrilled with how the game went. He's not psychotic. McCasland's grin was because this — the challenges and struggles of life in the Big 12, the opportunity to grow from setbacks like this — is what gets him out of bed in the morning.
"There are going to be nights where you may not play your best basketball," McCasland said, "but you better be a learner. You better be sticking together. You better really care for each other and you've got to quickly get back into how you're going to win.
"You can't consume yourself with what happened. You know what you're not doing well, and this is going to be hard. You've got to be like, yes, it's gonna be hard and I want it to be difficult. I love it. ...This is what we want."
This article originally appeared on Lubbock Avalanche-Journal: Texas Tech basketball, Houston coaches share similar sentiments on Big 12 life
