DALLAS -- For Houston and Kelvin Sampson, the journey to returning Cougar Basketball back to prominence was a foundational build.

Prior to Sampson’s arrival, the men's program had not advanced past the first round of the NCAA Tournament since 1983-84, when it played for a national championship under Guy Lewis. Now the Coogs are perennial Final Four contenders thanks to the grind-it-out style that Sampson’s instilled since his hiring in 2014.

But even as the 68-year-old gets most of the plaudits for Houston’s revival, his words and philosophies shine a light on who actually runs the program in his eyes.

"Player-led teams are far better than coach-led teams,” Sampson said. “This team is very much a player-led team. Jamal (Shead) gets a lot of the credit, as he should, but J'Wan (Roberts) doesn't get near enough credit. J'Wan is also a leader.”

Shead and Roberts are the lone four-year scholarship players on this season’s roster. The pair has experienced the true ascension of the program from its first Final Four appearance in nearly 40 years back during the 2020-21 season to winning the Big 12 in their first year as a member of the conference awaiting a head-to-head with college basketball blue-blood Duke.

They’re the two linchpins of Sampson’s high-octane defensive style that blitzes screens and has turned many Division I ball-handlers into junior varsity mistake-prone underclassmen overnight. Shead is a finalist for the Naismith Player of the Year and a front-runner to win National Defensive Player of the Year. Roberts is Houston’s starting forward two years running on now back-to-back conference champion teams. Houston finished fifth in defensive efficiency in KenPom a year ago and held the top defensive rating for much of this season.

“I don't think that we changed any type of motivation or changed what we've been doing all year and for the past four years that I've been here,” Shead said. “They had a winning culture before I got here, and it kind of got instilled in me playing with guys like J'Wan for four years and all the guys that were in front of us.

I feel like we do what we do day in and day out every day consistently, and we follow Coach Sampson, and I think that's the real reason we're here.

For Shead, he’s used to being both the lifeblood of a program and a part of history.

In high school, he led Manor to its best-ever basketball season in 2019 advancing all the way to a state semifinal. A booming suburb East of Austin, Manor’s population is now well over 18,000 but was closer to 5,000 when Shead was growing up. That gives him a small-town connection to the city.

“It's been awesome,” Shead said of the support he's gotten from his hometown. “Everybody that I know from there has been supporting me every step of the way, and when you are from a little town like that, you go back a lot. I've had my camps there. I go back a lot, watch football games, basketball games when I can, and go see my coaches when I can.”

A week after scoring 21 points and dishing 10 assists against Texas A&M, Shead prepares for arguably the biggest stage of his career in the Sweet Sixteen since taking the starting reins for the Cougars. He and Roberts have been a living testament to Sampson’s trust in home-grown recruitment. Yes, Houston uses the transfer portal, you can look to the likes of LJ Cryer and Mylik Wilson for evidence of that, but Sampson’s mentality and standards are best passed down via the program’s own products.

“When Jamal Shead came to our program, he was 17 years old,” Sampson said. “J'Wan was 17. Ja'Vier (Francis) was 17. Jojo (Tugler) was 17 when we signed him. He turned 18 May 27th. Then there's somebody else. Emanuel Sharp was 17 when he got to Houston. We like to take these young guys, put them through it, find out what they got, develop them, and then they become the stewards of our culture.