Milos Uzan was searching for a new school last year after entering the transfer portal following two seasons at Oklahoma when he talked to Houston assistant Kellen Sampson.

“He was saying how a lot of schools are trying to get into the tournament and what got me was he was saying how we’re trying to win it,” Uzan said. “And that’s just really what pulled me in.”

Uzan joined the second-ranked Cougars this season and his performance has helped them earn a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament, where they will face 16 seed SIU Edwardsville on Thursday as they chase their first national championship.

While Uzan is thriving now, it took time for him to start feeling good in his new environment. The point guard was the only new starter on the team and replaced Jamal Shead, one of the most decorated and popular players in recent school history.

Shead spent four seasons with the Cougars, helping the team to a 120-18 record in his career. He capped his spectacular time at Houston by becoming the first player in Big 12 history to win both player of the year and defensive player of the year and was a consensus All-American.

Given all that, coach Kelvin Sampson knew picking the right person to replace Shead could make or break his team this season.

“You just can’t take anybody,” Sampson said. “When you have four starters back, you got to be really careful about the kind of personality you add. Forget his skill set or what the numbers say. That’s never really floated my boat … but (it was) his personality, his willingness to fit in, and then did we think we could develop a little more competitiveness in him.”

The pressure of filling in for Shead coupled with adjusting to a new school and city was a lot for Uzan at first. He admitted September and October were particularly difficult for him, a situation made worse when a collision in practice led to a broken nose that required surgery.

He recovered and began to gel with his new team thanks in large part to the squad’s veterans.

“There’s great leadership on this team, L.J. (Cryer), Emanuel (Sharp), J’Wan (Roberts),” he said. “I feel like those guys really accepted me for who I am super early. So, I was able to get comfortable pretty quickly around these dudes.”

Though he was feeling better by the time games started he still wasn’t playing the way everyone knew he could. Teammates and coaches chided him for not being more aggressive as the leader of the offense. Uzan recalled a film session where Sampson told him that it feels like he’s “renting the place right now and needs me to own it.”

Cryer, a senior guard who leads the team at 15.3 points a game, agreed and said everyone encouraged him to be himself on the court.

“At first he was trying so hard to fit in and taking a backseat to us and that was good,” Cryer said. “But we knew we needed him to take another step for us to be a great team, and we ain’t need him to fit in no more. We needed him to stand out.”

Slowly he heeded their advice and after averaging just 8.9 points a game in the 12 games before Jan. 1, his averaged jumped to almost 12.6 points in the last 19 games of the regular season.

“When he noticed that we really have that belief in him,” Cryer said. “That’s when he started to take off.”

That support meant everything to Uzan.

“Stuff like that, it just, I think it builds up and eventually… you’ll start to flourish,” he said.

Uzan has also taken Sampson’s insistence on improving his assist to turnover ratio to heart. Last season he averaged 4.4 assists and two turnovers a game. In this year’s regular season, he again averaged 4.4 assists but lowered his turnovers to just 1.4 a game, a ratio which ranks 10th in the nation.

This is Houston’s school-record seventh straight trip to the tournament and the Cougars have reached the Final Four six times with their most recent trip coming in 2021. They won the Big 12 regular season title and Uzan’s career-high 25 points against Arizona led them to the conference tournament championship.

Uzan is confident he can help Houston reach the Final Four again and perhaps even bring home that elusive first title.

“This is why you come to places like this, and this is what you grow up dreaming about — playing in March Madness and making a run,” he said. “I think we can get this one done for sure.”