It has been 22 years since Quannas White was Kelvin Sampson’s point guard at the University of Oklahoma. But when Sampson unleashes one of his classic tongue-lashings on the position he holds to the highest standard, the hair on the back of White’s neck still stands up.
“Sometimes, when he’s getting on those guys, I have to look over my shoulder,” White, now an assistant for Sampson at Houston, says. “I think he’s getting on me.”
Sampson’s remarkable 11-year run at Houston has been marked by elite defense, conference championships and now, two Final Four runs. But at the heart of everything the Cougars have accomplished has been their point guards … and boy, have they had some good ones.
Since his second season at Houston, Sampson has coached just four starters at the position. The Cougars first trotted out Galen Robinson Jr., an unheralded three-star recruit who became a four-year starter and took Houston to its first Sweet 16 since “Phi Slama Jama.” DeJon Jarreau, a transfer from UMass, replaced Robinson and took Houston to the Final Four in 2021. Then came Jamal Shead, a three-year starter at the position who as a senior delivered a Big 12 title and earned first-team All-American honors. And now, Oklahoma transfer Milos Uzan is the latest to star in the role for Sampson, emerging as one of the best point guards in the country and lifting the Cougars to the brink of that elusive first national championship.
“All the point guards we’ve had here have been an extension of Coach Sampson on the floor,” White says. “That’s a huge reason we’ve been so successful.”
Houston’s 10 years of point guard dominance hasn’t always been statistically flashy. None has ever averaged more than 13 points per game. They’ve led their conference in assists per game just once. Shead has broken into the Toronto Raptors’ rotation, but the Houston PGs largely haven’t been top NBA prospects either. But it’s often said that wins and losses are a point guard stat. And if that’s true, no program has had better point guards than Houston. Shead lost 14 times in 108 starts. Jarreau’s record: 39–9. Robinson walked into a program that had made one NCAA tournament in 23 years prior to his arrival, and all he did was win 103 career games and take Houston dancing twice.
That made last spring’s roster machinations for Houston so fascinating. Jarreau and Shead each had a season to learn under their predecessor. There was no internal choice this time around; Sampson’s staff had to hit the portal for the replacement. The stakes were huge: Houston was set to bring back its other four starters and seven of its top nine players from a team that had gotten a No. 1 seed. But life without its All-American point guard was going to be incredibly difficult, especially given how ingrained in the system Shead had become. The replacement couldn’t just be any portal point guard.
“Jamal, he controlled everything,” junior Terrance Arceneaux says. “He knew all the spots, all the areas everyone needed to be.”
Enter Uzan, once a highly touted recruit who endured two uneven seasons at Oklahoma. Projected as a breakout star in 2023–24, Uzan hadn’t quite lived up to expectations, shooting under 40% from the field and watching as the Sooners faded down the stretch and missed the NCAA tournament. His stat line in his lone matchup with Houston wasn’t anything special, just six points on 3-of-6 shooting and four assists in a close loss. Around the Big 12, he had a reputation for being a bit soft … though the Houston staff preferred the term “finesse” to describe him. On paper, it was an odd marriage for such a key spot.
What couldn’t be seen on paper, but what assistant Kellen Sampson (who recruited Uzan) quickly found out, was that the ultra-competitive, ultra-physical environment that Houston had fostered under Kelvin Sampson was exactly what Uzan and his family felt he needed to take his next step.
“Milos’s father was his high school coach, and in talking with his dad, I could tell they were looking for something very specific and we felt like we could help him,” Kelvin Sampson said. “He said one time that he chose Houston because it was hard and he needed hard.”
“I felt like there was another version of myself that I could tap into, and Coach Sampson saw the same,” Uzan says.
It’s one thing to want to be coached hard and another to actually experience it … especially when it’s Sampson doing the coaching. Mental toughness is perhaps the most important skill to have in Sampson’s program, and everyone from eventual first-round picks to student managers gets pushed to their breaking point.
“Coming in, you’re like, ‘Dang, I’ve never been through anything like this before,’ but you get over it,” Arceneaux says. “A lot of us shed tears. [Sampson] tells you stories about how everyone was shedding tears and how difficult it was for them to transition and learn how to play at this program. You get to your lowest, and then there’s nowhere else to go but up.”
And the pressure was doubly on Uzan, both as the program’s only transfer that summer and as the point guard, the spot Sampson values most. The staff raved about his coachability and willingness to listen, but it’s hard for Sampson’s demanding style not to eventually weigh on you. Uzan says by the heat of preseason practice, he started to get toward his breaking point.
“As we got to September and October, that’s when he really started to press up on me,” Uzan says. “I could for sure feel it. But what he was doing, I understand it now.”
Complicating Uzan’s development? He suffered a broken nose in mid-October that sidelined him for three weeks, hugely valuable practice time for a player trying to get comfortable with a team that had largely been playing together for more than a year. And Houston didn’t have much time to get him up to speed, with a showdown with Auburn looming at the end of the first week of the season and a trip to the loaded Players Era Festival at Thanksgiving. Uzan did solo workouts with White (who works with the UH guards) to avoid contact that could’ve jeopardized his start to the season, but those reps weren’t the ones he desperately needed. Uzan played and held his own early on, but it was clear something was missing. Houston lost by five to Auburn and got tripped up in overtime by Alabama and San Diego State in Las Vegas to start just 4–3, the Cougars’ worst start under Sampson.
“I don’t think Milos had an identity yet. If your point guard doesn’t have an identity, your team doesn’t,” Sampson said. “There’s a big difference between playing hard versus competing. I think he knew how to play hard. I don’t think he had any idea how to compete. That’s a threshold that they all have to get over, is understanding the importance of competing. Some guys learn it quicker than others.”
Eventually, Sampson came into a practice with a rare critique for Uzan: You don’t foul enough. Houston’s program is built on physicality, and sometimes that means picking up fouls. Uzan was foulless in three of his first six games at Houston and had just one in a fourth. Sampson took that to mean his point guard wasn’t defending with enough zeal, and he was determined to get that out of him. That day in practice, he told Uzan to go for a steal every time backup point guard Mylik Wilson put the ball in his left. Fouls would be called on every player on the floor that day except Uzan. Sampson wanted him to be as physical as possible, whistles be damned.
“I was just looking for ways to get him more aggressive,” Sampson said. “That was not his nature, but I think that’s part of why his father wanted him to come to Houston. He needed that. He wanted that. As a coach, you have to have the ability to push kids to places they would not push themselves, and I think that’s why a lot of these kids choose Houston.”
He also had to get over the mental hurdle of being the outsider on a team full of returners. White recalls early on seeing Uzan be more passive, trying to make sure he got his teammates shots before looking for his own. Houston needed him to be more aggressive, more confident to reach its ceiling, but Uzan didn’t want to step on toes. But the veteran nucleus wanted him to emerge as the guy and poured the confidence into him to get him there.
“They gave him permission to be their point guard and then they would push him to do more, to be better, to be vocal, to be the leader,” Sampson said. “They wanted him to be their point guard and that’s what he needed.”
After that, things clicked, both for Uzan and for Houston as a whole. The conference opener against Oklahoma State felt like a turning point; he posted a sharp 12 points, six rebounds and four assists (plus three fouls) in a classic grind-it-out Houston affair, winning 60–47 after holding OSU without a field goal for a 12-minute stretch. That was part of an undefeated December and set the tone for the Cougars to roll through January, capped by one of the best games of the season: A road win at Kansas that featured a pair of remarkable Cougar comebacks, trailing by six with under 90 seconds to go in regulation and by six with 10 seconds to go in the first overtime.
Uzan had his fingerprints all over the overtime miracle, first with the assist on Emanuel Sharp’s three that cut the deficit to three and then with the steal that set up Wilson’s game-tying three. His final line: 17 points, nine rebounds, nine assists … and no turnovers, on the road in one of college basketball’s toughest environments. If there were any questions before whether he was the point guard to lead Houston to the promised land, they were gone now.
“You stopped hearing about Jamal [Shead],” Arceneaux says. “You started hearing about Milos this, Milos that. That was definitely a turning point.”
The marriage has turned into perhaps the most fruitful of any transfer portal partnership from last spring. Since December, Houston is 30–1, with Uzan as the missing piece everyone had hoped he’d be. He has shined in some of Houston’s biggest moments this season, from the comeback at Kansas to a career-high 25 points in the Big 12 title game vs. Arizona and finally, the buzzer-beating layup against Purdue in the Sweet 16 that will go down as one of the NCAA tournament’s most memorable moments. Uzan has, if nothing else, given this veteran Houston core the point guard it needed to compete with the best of the best and take another swing at a national championship.
And all that has translated to Uzan boosting his own personal stock. He has improved from a sub-30% three-point shooter as a sophomore at Oklahoma to over 44% this season. His turnovers have come down. He’s defending at a higher level. He’s now back on NBA draft boards and could hear his name called this June if he chooses to forgo his final college season, though Sampson and the Cougars would surely love to have him back. Performing well against Duke and their three projected top-10 picks Saturday in what may be the most-watched college game of the season would be yet another boost to his professional résumé.
Uzan’s success is also a sign of an old dog in Sampson learning new tricks. The continuity Houston has had at point guard, while incredible, is also unsustainable in the modern era. Keeping this Houston program consistently in the top five nationally as they have been for the last five years will require more instant-impact adds like Uzan and L.J. Cryer the year before who can quickly get acclimated to the Cougars’ not-for-everyone system. Houston believes it can still find players built to play for Sampson even in this climate, and Uzan is a heck of a success story of doing just that.
“We won’t change. Coach isn’t changing,” White says. “We’re really good at evaluating guys and making sure we have the right type of kids that come from great families and want to win first. The landscape of basketball is changing with NIL and all that stuff, but all the guys in the locker room right now, winning is at the forefront right now and getting paid is an added bonus.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Point Guard U: How Houston, Kelvin Sampson Bucked Their Tradition With Milos Uzan.
