BYU head coach Mark Pope didn’t need better players last week to beat No. 8 Gonzaga, he just needed guys with more experience. When the Zags turned up the heat in the final minutes, the youthful Cougars wilted under the pressure, blowing a 10-point lead and losing the game.
Lesson learned. Experience gained.
Saturday night against Pepperdine, BYU faced the last-place team in the West Coast Conference. This time, with a little more experience, the Cougars managed the late-game pressure with fewer mistakes and fewer missed free throws — and finished with a 10-point victory.
Lesson learned. Experience gained.
Make no mistake, Gonzaga and Pepperdine are separated by far more than wins and losses, but for BYU, just playing the games is what matters most. Pope knows his Cougars can’t become an experienced team without going through experiences — good and bad.
When it comes to winning, this is a roster void of any “been there, done that” testimonials. Gonzaga is just the opposite. In fact, star player Drew Timme has played in more sold-out Marriott Center games than anyone on BYU’s roster. He was the steady lighthouse for his teammates when the Cougars brought the storm midway through the second half.
As momentum shifted back to the Zags during the “championship minutes” of the battle, where contests are won or lost, it was Gonzaga that brought the tempest and without a Timme on the Cougars’ roster, when the waves came, the Cougars took on water and sank.
The moment proved too big for most of the BYU players who had never been in that kind of moment — and can you really blame them? Even as good as they played for as long as they did, the unravelling seemed unavoidable.
Of the four Cougars that had played against Gonzaga before — Gideon George, Spencer Johnson, Fousseyni Traore and Atiki Ally Atiki — none possessed a physical or emotional blueprint to beating them — and all four were on the Marriott Center floor last year when the Zags blew them out by 33.
Having Gonzaga on the ropes, like they did last Thursday, was as new to the older guys as it was to freshman starting point guard Dallin Hall, who was still on his church mission 12 months ago. However, while BYU got lost in its own undoing, the Cougars were gaining valuable experience as they were doing it, and when a different set of Waves rolled in Saturday night, they were more prepared to ride them out.
The Cougars led 41-28 at halftime and watched Pepperdine trim the lead to four just two minutes into the second half. By the 13:22 mark, BYU was back up by 10, only to see the Waves cut it to two a few minutes later.
The Cougars went ahead again by 10 with 9:30 to go, and Pepperdine sliced the lead back to a field goal at the 8:09 mark. BYU led by nine with 5:38 to play and the Waves trimmed it to three with 3:40 to go. Finally, the Cougars dug in and pushed the lead back to 10 and kept it as time expired.
The freshman tandem of Hall and Richie Saunders combined for 26 points — up from seven on Thursday. Hall, a 58% free-throw shooter, hit all four of his foul shots down the stretch and Saunders, a 28% 3-point shooter, dropped back-to-back bombs in the second half, which shook Pepperdine to its core.
After being taken to school by Gonzaga’s big men, Traore and Atiki, both sophomores, responded by combining for 30 points, 14 rebounds and five blocks and the Cougars as a whole, didn’t turn the ball over on a single inbounds pass.
Lesson learned. Experience gained.
BYU’s long athletic history is full of examples of the many painful ways student-athletes gained the necessary experience to prepare them to succeed later on, including some of the school’s biggest stars.
Quarterback Steve Young threw six interceptions in a three-point loss at No. 6 Georgia in 1982 and went on to become a Super Bowl MVP. In his BYU debut in 1988, quarterback Ty Detmer threw four interceptions in a 10-point defeat at Wyoming and went on to win the Heisman Trophy.
Quarterback Taysom Hill suffered three season-ending injuries at BYU and went on to become the only player in NFL history to score 10 touchdowns as a passer, receiver and runner — and he’s not finished. Quarterback Zach Wilson went 4-5 as a starter at BYU in 2019 before going 11-1 in 2020 and becoming the No. 2 overall draft pick by the New York Jets.
Even Jimmer Fredette’s Cougars lost in the second round of the 2010 NCAA Tournament before reaching the Sweet 16 a year later.
We live in an impatient world that demands immediate results. Frustrated Cougars fans want the team to grow up faster, to play with experience that they haven’t attained, and beat teams they aren’t ready to beat. At least not yet.
But every day they get a day older, each game they gain experience and, considering BYU is 9-2 over its last 11, it is getting better with road tests Thursday at Santa Clara (9 p.m. MST, CBS Sports Network) and Saturday at San Francisco (6 p.m., CBS Sports Network).
Looking ahead, when they do reunite with Gonzaga in Spokane on Feb. 11, they will have a blueprint to beat them — rebound, fight through screens and take care of the basketball — all three areas where they struggled in the one-point defeat. Most notably, by the time they tip off, BYU will be six games older, and, for the sake of Pope’s sanity, they should be six games the wiser — with lessons learned and experience gained.
Dave McCann is a contributor to the Deseret News and is the studio host for “BYU Sports Nation Game Day,” “The Post Game Show,” “After Further Review,” and play-by-play announcer for BYUtv. He is also co-host of “Y’s Guys” at ysguys.com.