“Big Snacks” serves up a feast as Cougars set table for Big 12 Championship rematch with Arizona

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — “What snacks you be eating and stuff,” senior guard Milos Uzan asked of freshman forward Chris Cenac Jr. “Coach (Kelvin Sampson) sometimes says when he’s hitting shots he doesn’t rebound.”

But on Friday night, he brought the whole menu, scoring 17 points and tying a career-high 14 rebounds to help No. 2 Houston roll past No. 3 Kansas with a 69-47 win in the Big 12 Tournament semifinals.

Sampson wrote “Big Snacks,” a nickname he gave Cenac earlier in the day, on the whiteboard in the locker room with his stat line.

Cenac’s third triple of the night helped Houston build a 12-point first-half lead. The Jayhawks briefly took a bite out of it, stringing together eight straight points to get as close as four with just over a minute remaining before halftime.

But Kansas missed 17 straight field goal attempts during a famine that lasted more than nine minutes, largely after halftime, allowing the Cougars to stretch their lead to as much as 24.

It was a much different story from when Houston traveled to Allen Fieldhouse on ESPN’s “Big Monday” on Feb. 23, when the Cougars never led in the second half and fell 69-56.

“I feel like we had that in the back of our mind,” Uzan said. “Just knowing what they did to us at their spot, I think it was a little personal for us.”

Uzan’s name was also written on the whiteboard with seven defensive rebounds next to it.

That’s seven more rebounds than Uzan had in Houston’s first go-round with Kansas three weeks ago, where he came away empty-handed in 28 minutes.

It was a night when his scoring was not his main course. He only chipped in six points, but didn’t need to do the heavy lifting.

Freshman guard Kingston Flemings served a game-high 21 points with three triples as Houston shot a very efficient 10-of-18 from 3-point range.

For Kansas, freshman guard Darryn Peterson was the only Jayhawk in double figures with 14 points as the Jayhawks shot just 19.4% from the floor in the second half.

After the game, Cenac slapped the Cougars’ sticker onto the bracket’s championship game spot. For the second straight season, Houston will meet No. 1 Arizona in the tournament final on Saturday at 5 p.m.

These Cougars are still hungry.