For Star subscribers: When two of your starters have one of those weekends, you can’t play the what-if game as Arizona has done so many times after seemingly premature NCAA Tournament exits against everybody from Wisconsin to Xavier to UConn…
Greg Hansen SAN ANTONIO — Arizona never led. It was Phi Jama Slammed, if you’ll pardon a reference to the Houston Cougars of old.Houston didn’t do anything fancy to beat Arizona on Thursday night, 72-60. It didn’t dominate, it didn’t put on a dunkfest or turn the heads of NBA scouts.
In a football sense, they do not let you convert fourth downs near the goal line and they don’t fumble or fear playing a No. 1 seed with a 33-3 record. Arizona coach Tommy Lloyd didn’t walk into Thursday’s game blind or with a flawed gameplan. Before the Wildcats left Tucson on Tuesday, his practice session was full of football equipment — like blocking pads. Each player was pushed around and banged around and warned that the Cougars weren’t about to let them run and dunk.
A lot of basketball analysts and many more fans don’t give Houston much thought because the Cougars play in an off-the-main-road league, the American Athletic Conference, with Tulane and East Carolina and South Carolina. But if you study the Cougars’ five losses this year all came against postseason teams: Wisconsin, a No. 3 seed; two losses to Memphis, which reached the second round; Alabama, which lost in the first round, and SMU, which reached the second round of the NIT.
On six of the next seven possessions, Tubelis went pell-mell to the bucket. But Houston gummed up the paint with so many bodies — Sampson said he changed the way the Cougars defended ball-screens, correctly predicting Arizona’s change in schemes.