Over the past decade, Kelvin Sampson has transformed Houston men’s basketball into a juggernaut, a program that’s regularly in the hunt for national championships and is relevant in a way it hadn’t been since the halcyon days of Phi Slama Jama in the 1980s.
As he sees it, Sampson achieved all of that despite some considerable, occasionally unavoidable obstacles.
While discussing his program’s strong track record with player retention during his post-game news conference after a 79-55 win against Central Florida on Wednesday, Feb. 4, Sampson bemoaned Houston’s place in the broader and increasingly expensive world of college athletics, even describing the university’s athletic department as “very poor.”
“We’re poor,” Sampson said. “We were poor when I got here and we’re still poor. We probably have the lowest budget of anybody in Power Four. The way our recruiting is going, we have to stop at some point because we don’t have the money to keep bringing in many good players. And that’s not easy for us to do.”
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According to a USA TODAY Sports database from 2024, Houston ranked 56th among Division I public schools in total athletic revenue, though those figures came when the Cougars were still in what was then known as the American Athletic Conference. They made the jump to the Big 12 ahead of the 2023-24 academic year, a move that comes with more athletic revenue through the conference’s more lucrative media-rights deal.
That number ranked them last among the Big 12’s current 13 public members. Baylor, BYU and TCU are private schools and their athletic department financial data isn’t publicly available through open-records requests.
Compounding matters is their location in Texas, where they compete for players and attention with the deep-pocketed likes of Texas and Texas A&M. Even Texas Tech has become a powerhouse in the era of name, image and likeness deals, due in large part to the helping hand of billionaire booster Cody Campbell.
Houston has a mega-donor of its own in Houston Rockets owner Tilman Fertitta, who donated $20 million in 2017 to complete a $60 million renovation of the school’s basketball arena, which is now known as the Fertitta Center.
Sampson once again has one of the best teams in the sport one year after losing in the national championship game, with a 20-2 record and a No. 8 ranking in the latest USA TODAY Sports Coaches Poll. Houston has a number of stars on its roster, including a pair of projected first-round NBA Draft picks in freshmen Kingston Flemings and Chris Cenac Jr. Both players were top-20 recruits in the 2025 class. In the 2026 class, it has already signed seven-foot-one center Arafan Diane, the No. 16 prospect in the country.
Sampson acknowledged that his best players are well-compensated, even with some of the school’s financial shortcomings.
“They’re not starving here,” he said. “They’re getting exactly what the market is for them.”
The Cougars’ football program has excelled on the recruiting trail as well. Quarterback Keisean Henderson, the No. 1 overall player in the 2026 recruiting class in 247Sports’ composite rankings, signed with Houston. Henderson is from nearby Spring, Texas.
For Sampson and his basketball program, some of the biggest hurdles come when trying to build a deep and full roster because, based on his experiences, the program eventually runs out of money to offer to prospective additions.
“Teams that have the best recruiting classes usually have the most money,” Sampson said. “That’s the way it is today. Who knows who else we’ll sign? It depends on how much money we have. It’s not about who we want to sign; it’s about who can we afford to sign?”
Since the start of the 2017-18 season, the Cougars have gone 263-46 and made the NCAA Tournament every year in which it was held, including runs to the Final Four in 2021 and 2025. Last year, according to the USA TODAY Sports coaching salary database, Sampson was the 16th highest-paid coach in men’s college basketball, bringing in $4.6 million.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Kelvin Sampson says Houston has ‘a very poor athletic department’
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