Time, patience paying off in BYU basketball's 8-0 start

PROVO — Sometimes the difference between a .500 team in the West Coast Conference and one of six unbeaten teams in the Big 12 is time.

A year ago, the BYU men's basketball team was plodding to a 19-15 record, including a 7-9 mark in its final season in the WCC, with a host of newcomers and a roster that struggled to congeal except with the consistency of a tub of week-old pudding.

By Tuesday night, the 14th-ranked Cougars were shooting 56% from the field in the second half, draining 14-of-31 from 3-point range, outrebounding visiting Evansville 47-34 en route to a 96-55 win over the Purple Aces (7-2, 1-1 Missouri Valley) that also handed BYU its eighth-straight win to start the 2023-24 season.

Adversity will surely hit the 8-0 Cougars, certainly in a Big 12 Conference that features five other teams ranked in the Associated Press Top 25 and six undefeated teams that included top-tier Houston (8-0) and Baylor (9-0), and perhaps as soon as Saturday's rivalry road tilt with 6-2 Utah (5 p.m. MST, Pac-12 Network).

So what changed between last season's descent into mediocrity to make head coach Mark Pope's team one of the hottest in college basketball, with the No. 1 rating in the NET, with three Quad 1 and Quad 2 wins? The reality is, not much.

Jaxson Robinson is still canning triples, leading the best-in-the-nation bench with a team-high 16.9 points per game on a roster that includes five double-digit scorers. Noah Waterman has become a fixture in the starting lineup, averaging 11.3 points and 6.8 rebounds, and Spencer Johnson is (still) a fixture in college basketball, defying Father Time — or at least, traditional NCAA eligibility standards — with 11.9 points and 5.0 rebounds for the unbeaten Cougs.

Sure, Aly Khalifa has stepped into the starting lineup in the absence of Fousseyni Traore (hamstring), and shown why Pope calls him the best passing big man in the NCAA with 17 points, 21 rebounds and 17 assists in five games, including two starts.

But the Charlotte transfer is the only newcomer to play a role in BYU's season to date (save for Trevin Knell, the veteran who missed the 2022-23 season following shoulder surgery), and former UC Irvine scoring wing Dawson Baker and four-star freshman Marcus Adams Jr. are likely — "hopefully," Pope has said — at least a couple weeks from making their season debut.

In an age of a transfer portal where name, image and likeness has created its own version of free agency and shuffled rosters to the highest bidder, the 2023-24 Cougars are showing — at least for now — that the biggest change year-over-year can come from continuity. Patience is a virtue, and BYU's virtue is paying off early.

BYU's 8-0 start, in many ways, started during last year's struggles.

"I think that was the plan, right? Everybody has a plan, but these guys are executing it brilliantly right now," Pope said. "It's actually the special stuff that happened in the summer and last year. The world outside of our locker room is so wildly different than the world inside our locker room. Sometimes you hear things being said or whatever, and it's crazy how different the perception of the world is inside the locker room.

"Inside of our locker room, we felt like last year was a massive win," he added. "What these accomplished as freshmen and sophomores was remarkable. What Trevin Knell accomplished as the shot doctor and growing guys all during the year was incredible. This summer, what our guys did was incredible; our guys worked so hard — Trevin could give you extensive details all summer long about growing relationships with each guy on this team, and then bringing the team together for random, totally traditional, weird BYU student activities over and over again."

Sitting next to Pope, Knell chuckled at the thought of those activities. His only explanation: "Date night goes crazy, guys."

But Robinson is a key example of what time can do to a players' game. A year ago, the 6-foot-7 newcomer from Ada, Oklahoma, was trying to adapt to a unique university owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and a unique new home like Provo.

Robinson had been through the transfer portal process before, coming from Arkansas and Texas A&M. But BYU was unlike anything he had experienced, even as he adjusted to start 30 of 33 games while averaging 8.5 points, 2.9 rebounds and 1.9 assists per game.

Coming off the bench has doubled the two-guard's production as he's shooting 47.2% from the field and 43.8% from deep in 16.6 minutes per game.

"Jax had a complicated road to get here to BYU that probably developed some questions of trust and security," Pope said. "But he made a huge effort this summer to build relationships with these guys, and they (Knell and Robinson) are two of the ring leaders. All of that stuff is giving us a chance to be what we are right now. It's 100% a growth thing, and we're in this, not just for this year but for next year also. We can bring the vast majority of these guys back next year, and when you have a really special group of people in the locker room with growth mindsets, you get to grow. And these guys have."

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