Getty Marcus Sasser and the Houston Cougars look for another run to the Final Four this season.
Houston looks to start the season strong against Northern Colorado on Monday, November 7.
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The game (8 p.m. ET start time) won’t be on a regular TV channel anywhere, but everyone in the US can watch Northern Colorado vs Houston live on ESPN+ right here:
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Northern Colorado vs Houston Preview
Houston looks to continue one of the more successful runs in college basketball when tipping off against Northern Colorado on Monday.
Except for the COVID-shortened season in 2020, Houston won 27 or more games in each of the past five seasons. The Cougars reached the Final Four in 2021 and fell short in the Elite Eight last season. The Cougars advanced past the first round in its past four tournament appearances.
This season’s Houston squad has AAC Player of the Year favorite Marcus Sasser plus a promising freshman in Jarace Walker. The Cougars enter the season as favorites to win the AAC and contend for a national title.
“We know, we see it. Everybody knows,” Sasser said via the Houston Chronicle’s Joseph Duarte. “I just feel like it gives us more motivation. We have big standards, high goals. We know what it takes to get there.”
“Ever since the year when we got to the Final Four, every game after that it was [opponents’] biggest game,” Sasser said per Duarte. “I feel like it’s a good thing for us, to help us come out every game with our ‘A’ game because every team is trying to beat us.”
Northern Colorado, a Big Sky Conference team, looks to pull and upset and add a major feather to the program’s cap. The Bears won 20-plus games in four of the past five seasons but haven’t made the Big Dance due to not winning the Big Sky Conference tournament and qualifying with an at-large bid.
UNC’s best chance during that span came in 2018 with a 26-12 mark. The Bears made it once in 2011 and pulled a first-round upset. This season, UNC enters as the No. 2 team in the conference’s preseason poll.
While UNC crashing the Big Dance would make for a successful season, it’s arguably Final Four or bust for the Cougars.
“It’s hard to get [to the Final Four]. There’s not a lot of teams that even make it there. We’ve been there before. We know what it takes,” Sasser said per Duarte.
It hasn’t been this way for Houston forever. Cougars head coach Kelvin Sampson talked about the time period before Houston became a national power again — the long drought after the program’s glory days in the 1980s.
“I remember we were playing Arkansas at Texas Southern [in 2017] and seriously I don’t remember the TV crew, but I do remember the tone of the interview,” Sampson said per Duarte. “The questions that were being asked was, ‘How in the world are you guys going to stay on the floor with them? What are you going to do to slow them down? How are you going to stop this guy or that guy?’ If my memory serves me right, we won by 30 [91-65].”
“Going into the game, I don’t think there was any doubt in our mind we were going to win,” Sampson added. “But people outside are so used to losing they weren’t on the inside; they didn’t know what we knew. You get so tied into the past that you haven’t moved to the future. Well, we have.”