Kelvin Sampson’s success at Oklahoma was never much about flash. A denim-shirt sort of guy, it never took long for Sampson to shed his sportcoat on the Sooners’ sideline.

His players were known more for their toughness than for their talent. You might be able to run faster or jump higher than Sampson’s Sooners, but you weren’t going to outwork them. Now he will take that brand of basketball to Indiana, where he was introduced Wednesday as the new head coach of the Hoosiers.

Sampson built his program by supplementing a handful of high-school recruits like Eduardo Najera, Hollis Price and Kevin Bookout with a bevy of junior-college transfers including Aaron McGhee, Quannas White, Ebi Ere, Daryan Selvy, Taj Gray and Terrell Everett.

He never produced an NBA superstar, but that didn’t stop him from getting the Sooners to the Final Four in 2002 and the NCAA Tournament just about every year. He won three straight Big 12 Conference tournaments, and his nine consecutive 20-win seasons put him in an exclusive club with Arizona’s Lute Olson, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, Connecticut’s Jim Calhoun and Kentucky’s Tubby Smith.

But Sampson did it without the likes of Gilbert Arenas, Elton Brand, Carmelo Anthony, Richard Hamilton or Tayshaun Prince.

“We’ve got to congratulate him, wish him the best. He gave us his heart and soul,” Oklahoma athletic director Joe Castiglione said Wednesday. “I don’t feel at any time that Kelvin shorted us on effort or intensity or passion or commitment. I thought all the way up to the point in time that Indiana made that call, I thought he gave it everything he had for 12 years, great years.”

Sampson’s next recruiting class, featuring McDonald’s All-American guard Scottie Reynolds, was supposed to be his best.

But the switch to recruiting top-caliber prep players was what resulted in the only smear on Sampson’s record at Oklahoma. He blamed more than 550 impermissible recruiting calls on the increased effort needed to pursue the best high-school talent. Oklahoma has admitted the calls were made, and an NCAA panel will meet with school officials next month to seek a resolution.

Oklahoma head coach Kelvin Sampson takes his coat off during a game with Missouri in an NCAA basektball game, Jan. 10, 2006, in Norman, Okla. Sampson and Indiana were completing contract details Tuesday, March 28, 2006 that would make him the Hoosiers' next basketball coach, a person close to the negotiations told The Associated Press.

“You know, junior-college kids, they call you,” Sampson told an NCAA investigator. “The coach calls you, puts the kid on the phone all the time. Those high-profile high school kids, nobody calls you. That was different.”

Sampson will leave behind a university where season basketball tickets are a way to earn “priority points” toward getting seats at the Oklahoma-Texas football game and where many of the 12,000 seats sold remain empty unless there’s a T-shirt giveaway or Texas is in town.

Fans who’d been used to watching Billy Tubbs’ Sooners score in triple digits and Wayman Tisdale put up 25 points a night seemed to be tiring of Sampson’s style – where rebounding margins were more likely to be gaudy than point totals.

At Indiana, it’s a whole new ballgame.

His teams will play home games at Assembly Hall, where average attendance was nearly 17,000 this year. And instead of being underappreciated for perennial NCAA Tournament bids, he’ll be expected to restore the Hoosiers’ elite status.

In recent weeks, Sampson had sidestepped rumors that he was interested in the opening at Arizona State, even suggesting there was no reason he should have been asked about going to the Sun Devils. But that was no Indiana.

“It’s really flattering when other schools call and ask permission to talk to you and you listen to them. I think you owe it to yourself to listen to people,” Sampson said in an interview last week with the AP.

“I’ve been here 12 years now. This is the University of Oklahoma’s program, and I’ll never forget that. I think all coaches are temporary. Like that was Roy’s (Williams) program at Kansas for a long time, but Kansas will be there a lot longer than Roy, and Oklahoma will be here a lot longer than I am.”