Kelvin Sampson's Beginnings in Butte, Montana

Houston completed an all-time, pantheon-level comeback against the Duke Blue Devils on Saturday in the Final Four.

The Cougars will play for something they've never accomplished in program history: A National Championship.

Houston Cougars Head Coach Kelvin Sampson has H-Town on the brink of immortality, and Montanans should be pulling for him.

Montana Tech days

Kelvin Sampson spent 1 season as an assistant with the Montana Tech Orediggers Men's Basketball team and 4 seasons as head coach from 1981 to 1985. It was Sampson's first job as a post-grad assistant.

After the win on Saturday over Duke, NBC Montana's Josh Margolis asked Coach Sampson how important his stint in Butte was. Sampson gave plenty of credit to former Griz and Michigan State Head Coach Jud Heathcote.

"I got to Montana Tech through Jud Heathcote," said Sampson, who spent one season as a grad assistant with Heathcote and the Spartans.

"[Montana Tech] named me the head coach, but they never had a winning season. Everybody there that played, every student was an engineer. I could never get into school there and I'm coaching those guys in basketball... But they hired me as their basketball coach because it was not important. If it had been important, they would have never hired me," chuckled Sampson.

Coach Sampson VS Gonzaga in this year's NCAA Tourney. Credit: Jamie Squires (Getty Images)

Jud Heathcote Credit: Getty Images, Canva

Basketball at Montana Tech in the 80s may not have been important, but it proved to be a critical domino in Sampson's career and, eventually, the landscape of college basketball.

In fact, basketball was so unimportant that players could skip practice whenever school needed to be addressed.

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"They didn't ask me; they just said, 'Hey, I'm not gonna be at practice today.' Now, that would be taboo, I wouldn't listen to that."

He's right. Today's college basketball, with NIL and how much money is being poured into media rights, players would be suspended and probably kicked off the team if they voluntarily skipped out on practice.

In the famous words of Bob Dylan, "The times they are-a changing."

I recommend you listen to Sampson's full response from Saturday's presser.

After Butte, Sampson took the head coaching job at Washington State, Oklahoma and Indiana before jumping to the NBA from 2008-2014.