HOUSTON — A day before his team’s latest win, Houston coach Kelvin Sampson thumbed through three inch-high stacks of rubber-band-bound sticky notes in search of a reminder of what his team used to be. To sort thoughts he’s had over the course of any season, he keeps these practice logs — “a journey in time,” he called them, before adding that so much paper had turned his wooden desk into a “kind of organized chaos.”



After some searching, Sampson found the note he wanted, one from late October, before Houston (21-1) won its first 15 games and climbed to the AP poll’s No. 13 spot. To end a 7 a.m. practice, Sampson kicked his players out because they were “threatened by each other instead of embracing each other,” he said, reading from the note. “We have to learn to surrender (to one another) — cultivate relationships, guide your response, humility.”



The fifth-year Cougars coach...