After the BYU basketball team defeated Oklahoma State 85-71 in the regular-season finale, Mark Pope, the coach of the Cougars, showered senior Jaxson Robinson and Spencer Johnson with praise.
The Cougars will start as the No. 5 seed in this week’s Big 12 conference tournament at T-Mobile Center in Kansas City.
And with good cause. The Cougars won their sixth straight game at home behind the combined 31 points, 15 rebounds, and six assists from the two players.
The players then correctly pointed out that Pope should take a lot of the credit for himself.
It’s not unreasonable to argue that Pope ought to have been among the top three candidates for the Big 12 Coach of the Year title, which Houston’s Kelvin Sampson won on Sunday night.
Although many thought BYU would struggle after being 7-9 in the West Coast Conference the previous year, the Cougars’ head coach since 2019 has done an incredible job preparing the team to compete in the Big 12.
As they say, the evidence is in the pudding.
BYU, which was selected eighth out of the 14 teams in the league in October, was by far the largest climber, moving up eight spots to fifth. The next two greatest movers were Texas Tech (selected eighth, tied for third with Baylor), and Iowa State (chosen seventh, finished second), both at plus-five.
Two first-round games between No. 13 Oklahoma State and No. 12 Central Florida and No. 14 West Virginia and No. 11 Cincinnati will kick off the Big 12 tournament on Tuesday.
The fact that BYU (10-8, 22-9) is not participating in one of those contests is a credit to the efforts of Pope, his staff, and the players themselves. Remember that BYU lost its first two conference games—at home against Cincinnati and away against Baylor—and that in Game 3, it trailed UCF in Orlando before coming back to win the second half.
With a 12-1 nonconference record and a poor schedule intentionally, things were beginning to look a little suspicious. But Pope and his team made a full recovery.
There has been a notable improvement.
Johnson stated, “I would say together (is the word that describes the 2023–24 Cougars).” “I have never worked with a group that is this cohesive, this invested in each other’s personal and professional lives, and all the jokes and wonderful times we share together.”
In the event that BYU prevails on Wednesday, it will play No. 4 seed Texas Tech in a quarterfinal showdown on Thursday at 10:30 a.m. Jan. 20 in Lubbock saw the Red Raiders overcome a 17-point deficit to defeat the Cougars 85-78.
Additionally, Houston is on BYU’s side of the bracket.
Actually, given that the Jayhawks’ route to Saturday’s title game bypasses Houston and Texas Tech—possibly the two best teams in the tournament—BYU may have been better off receiving Kansas’ No. 6 seed.
Pope stated that BYU’s seeding and draw in its first Big 12 tournament actually don’t matter because there are no easy games in the conference.
The best thing about the Big 12 is that each member is exceptional. That is the reality as it is. The past few days, while attempting to consider seeding and who we play, we kind of lost ourselves for a few minutes,” Pope said. “You think, ‘Well, they are great, and they are great, and they are great, and they are great,’ for every scenario you write down.
Therefore, it serves as a sort of therapy. It’s nothing to be concerned about. All we know is that we are playing a fantastic team on Wednesday. And if we triumph, we’ll play a fantastic team on Thursday. And that’s kind of this league’s beauty,” he said in closing.
Leave a Reply