The first five minutes may decide everything for Idaho against Houston

There is a moment, usually early, when a game like this decides what it’s going to be.

Dennis Patchin has seen it enough times to recognize the pattern. It comes in the first few minutes, when the noise feels louder, the passes a little tighter, the margin a little thinner.

“I’ve found that it’s typically the first five minutes where guys will have some jitters,” he told the Sporting News.

For Idaho, that window may matter more than anything else.

Because once the game takes shape, the reality of the matchup takes over.

Houston does not just defend. It presses, crowds, and wears on you. The Cougars allow just 62.9 points per game, turn defense into offense, and play with a level of physicality that rarely shows up on Idaho’s schedule.

“You know when you’re playing against Kelvin Sampson, you better bring your lunch pail and your hard hat,” Patchin said. “That’s really the key for the Vandals is if they’ll be able to handle the physicality.”

And yet, there is something about this Idaho team that suggests it will not back away.

They score. More than Houston, even. They shoot it just as well. They go nine, sometimes ten deep. A freshman like Jackson Rasmussen does not look like a freshman, and Kolton Mitchell carries himself like the kind of guard who absorbs contact rather than avoids it.

For a while, that might be enough.

If Idaho can weather the opening stretch, limit turnovers, and stay connected on the glass, then the math begins to shift. The possessions lengthen. The pressure changes sides. The favorite starts to feel it.

But that first stretch, those first five minutes, will tell you everything.

Whether this becomes a game Idaho can play, or one it simply has to survive.

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