OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma \u2013 Even though it was 346 days ago, the Houston Cougars\u2019 heartbreaking loss to the University of Florida in the 2025 National Championship game still stings. <\/p>\n
Senior guard Milos Uzan told us that this year\u2019s team has used that game as motivation for how they\u2019re approaching this year\u2019s March Madness. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt hurt all of us for a little while just because we know that we had that game, but we kind of let go of it,\u201d said Uzan. \u201cIt definitely hurt for a while. I think a lot of us are using that as a chip on our shoulder(s) and a little bit of motivation for sure. But I think now it\u2019s a new season, you gotta put that behind you, and you gotta focus on what\u2019s in front of you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Uzan has become a mentor to freshman guard and projected NBA lottery pick Kingston Flemings, who shared with us how the older players on the team have helped prepare him for the NCAA Tournament. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe have players that have been there that know what it takes, so just following after them,\u201d said Flemings. \u201cObviously, we got some people that are new, me, Chase (McCarty), and the other freshman we\u2019ve never played in these games so following after Ramon, who\u2019s had crazy games in this (tournament), Milos, Jo-Jo (Joseph Tuglaer) who\u2019ve played in these games every single year so just following them and just doing what they tell us, what coach tells us, and just at the end of the day playing basketball, it\u2019s march madness now but it\u2019s no different than any other Big 12 game.\u201d <\/p>\n
The Cougars tip off against the Idaho Vandals at 9:10 p.m. in Oklahoma City. <\/p>\n
Copyright 2026 by KPRC Click2Houston – All rights reserved.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma \u2013 Even though it was 346 days ago, the Houston Cougars\u2019 heartbreaking loss to the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":212335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[1770,56,2742,44557,58,57,48876,21306,3125,1771,3112,154],"class_list":["post-212334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-houston","tag-basketball","tag-houston","tag-houston-cougars","tag-houston-cougars-basketball","tag-houston-headlines","tag-houston-news","tag-march-madness","tag-mens-basketball","tag-milos-uzan","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-tournament","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=212334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/212334\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/212335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=212334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=212334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=212334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}