Kelvin Sampson may go down as the as the best men’s basketball coach Oklahoma’s has ever had. Not for me. He’s No. 2 and it isn’t close. But he might. It all depends on who’s writing the history and if it’s a Kelvin guy, well, it will be Kelvin.

Because if there’s one thing Sampson can do, it’s breed loyalty. And if there’s another, it’s win. And if there’s another, it’s win consistently. And if there’s another, well, frankly, it’s alienate so many whose loyalty he never bred.

Such a lightning rod, Sampson.

He’s leaving OU the winner of 279 basketball games.

That’s a lot of games. He went to the NCAA Tournament 11 of 12 seasons and that’s a lot of Madness. He won three straight Big 12 tournaments and if that’s not delivering excitement to your fans, nothing is.

He can coach.

No doubt.

But it was time for him to go.

No doubt.

Sampson will be reinvigorated at Indiana. He’ll make blue-collar lunch-pailers out of whatever he finds today at Bloomington and he’ll be a lot better than Mike Davis starting today. Because his kids will play hard and Hoosier fans are dying for a team that overachieves and Sampson will deliver it there.

Even after he quit delivering it here.

The coach who made his name by doing more with less, and maybe a couple of seasons by doing something with nothing, had started doing less with more; that is, as long as he could keep more from transferring.

Anybody who failed to see the issues facing, as Sampson so loved to call it, Sooner Basketball, had to be wearing blinders.

When your program becomes a turnstyle — Drew Lavender, Lawrence McKenzie, Larry Turner, Brandon Foust, De’Angelo Alexander — you have a problem.

When you return four starters from a team that won the Big 12 regular season championship and go seven consecutive games to end the season beating nobody by more than a point, you have a problem.