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PROVO — Not since going 9-21 in Steve Cleveland's final season or perhaps the 1-25 days of Roger Reid and the late Tony Ingle has the BYU men's basketball squad flown as far under the radar as 2023-24.
The Cougars weren't picked to win what most regard as the toughest college basketball conference in America by the preseason coaches' poll Friday. Not even close.
Instead, Big 12 coaches picked the Cougars 13th in the conference in the annual preseason poll of the now 14-team league that will lose Texas and Oklahoma next year and still swell to 16 members.
Kansas was picked to win the league for the 20th time in 28 seasons in the annual preseason coaches' poll, receiving 12 of 14 votes (coaches are not permitted to vote for their own team). League newcomer Houston collected the other two first-place votes, followed by Texas, Baylor and TCU.
BYU's 13th-place projection was third of the league's four newcomers, ahead of only No. 14 UCF.
The Cougars were also shut out of the Big 12 preseason superlatives and all-conference team released Thursday. Kansas senior Hunter Dickinson was named Preseason Player of the Year and Newcomer of the Year after transferring from Michigan, and Baylor's Ja'Kobe Walter took home Preseason Freshman of the Year honors.
Not a single Cougar player was named to the five-member first team or among the 11 honorable mentions. In fact, only Houston's Jamal Shead represented the four new schools of BYU, Cincinnati, Houston and UCF.
But maybe that isn't so bad for the Cougars, who went 19-15 a year ago including a 7-9 mark in West Coast Conference play. It was only the second time the team failed to reach the 20-win plateau since Dave Rose took over the program ahead of the 2005-06 season.
"There's a lot of noise and we try to limit it, for the most part. But obviously some of it reaches us. The stuff that does, we love it; that's just fuel to the fire," said BYU guard Dallin Hall, an All-WCC Freshman selection a year ago who started 21 of 34 games and finished with the sixth-most assists by a rookie (108) in program history. "People counting us out, we wouldn't have it any other way. It's just fuel to the fire. We don't care what anyone else thinks we can do. We just care what the guys in that locker room believe, and we hold ourselves to a high standard. We believe we can do great things and the rest is just noise. But we deliver we determine our own destiny."
In the era of increased roster movement and the transfer portal, BYU was selective in overhauling its roster, or at least successfully utilized the portal sparingly. Either way, the Cougars — who lost point guard Rudy Williams and wing Gideon George to graduation, and Tanner Toolson (UVU), Braeden Moore (Oral Roberts), and walk-on Hao Dong (Chinese pro career) to the portal — brought in former Charlotte big Aly Khalifa, UC Irvine scoring wing Dawson Baker and four-star freshman Marcus Adams Jr., who is still awaiting a decision from the NCAA regarding his immediate eligibility after the top-50 recruit initially signed with Kansas and transferred to Gonzaga prior to enrolling at BYU.
Of course, limited changes can also breed consistency: four of the Cougars' full-time starters from a year ago return, including Hall and all-conference forward Fousseyni Traore. Trevin Knell, the 6-foot-5 shooter from Woods Cross, has also been cleared to return after missing the 2022-23 season following shoulder surgery.
BYU also has one scholarship to give on its roster, a practice head coach Mark Pope has followed since he was at Utah Valley to keep an open mind with future portal prospects or reclassifying prep recruits (like Adams).
But with the limited changes, Pope likes to say "seniors are magic" — and the Cougars have four of them in journeyman wing Spencer Johnson, former Arkansas wing Jaxson Robinson, 6-foot-11 wing Noah Waterman and walk-on Tredyn Christensen, the Eagle Mountain product who initially signed with Division II Chaminade before returning home for his final two years of eligibility.
"The Big 12, on paper, looks fantastic once again," BYU assistant coach Nick Robinson said. "For us to be able to have 10 practices on our foreign tour and to have most of our guys a year older has actually been really exciting for us as we've gone through practice this fall. In addition to the transfers that have come in and working their way into the system and the flow of things, we feel like we're gonna get a good nonconference experience to prepare us for the Big 12 when it comes."
The Cougars' regular season starts Nov. 6 against Houston Christian, followed by a short turnaround to face Mountain West preseason favorite San Diego State on Nov. 10 in the Marriott Center.
