BYU’s loss to Alabama will sting, but Kevin Young is just getting started

After BYU’s loss to Alabama, there’s a feeling that head coach Kevin Young was just kicking the tires this year.

Instead of the end of a season, it may be the start of a new era for Cougar basketball.

Young started the season with a learning curve and ended it with valuable NCAA Tournament experience after his first year as a major college coach at BYU.

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On Thursday night in the Sweet 16, No. 6 seed BYU stepped into the bright burning sun of No. 2 seed Alabama’s bomb show and blinked.

Nobody’s ever had 25 3-pointers rained down upon them in NCAA Tournament history until BYU did in New Jersey as it lost to Alabama 113-88.

“The future at BYU is incredibly bright,” said Young. “I think anyone that pays attention to the sport would agree with that.”

—  BYU coach Kevin Young

Historic and amazing.

For both teams.

BYU decided to go under Alabama’s ball screens. That opened the door for the nation’s top shooting team to light them up bonfire style.

Now, Young wants to make sure it never happens again.

Unless it’s his guys doing the bombing.

Alabama came into the BYU game with 6-of-21 and 7-of-17 shooting from distance in a pair of NCAA tourney wins. As the No. 1 2-point shooting team, Young’s staff emphasized stopping that aspect of Alabama’s attack and analytically believed a struggling Mark Sears and Company would cool off.

They never did, and Sears made 10 treys.

No shame in losing to a blistering-hot team like that. All-American Sears was on fire while Cougar Trevin Knell’s 3-pointer just 10-seconds after intermission earned him a technical foul.

It was that kind of night for the Cougars.

This weekend, Young returns to his office with far more credibility as a college coach than he came in with last April when he replaced Kentucky-bound Mark Pope.

His team finished 26-10. His program has a clear identity and blueprint. Some experts have declared BYU and the way Young is doing it is the future of the college game.

Picked to finish ninth in the Big 12, his team finished tied for third with a 14-6 league record and first NCAA Tournament win in 13 years.

Losing to Alabama and going home will hurt. But nobody projected his team would be on that stage with two NCAA Tournament wins for the first time in 14 years.

He’s got the No. 1 high school recruit in the country coming to town in AJ Dybantsa and the No. 33-ranked 247Sports player in that class in center Xavion Staton.

He could return NBA lottery pick Egor Demin and should get his best players back, All-Big 12 wing player Richie Saunders, shot-block jumper Keba Keita, Mihailo Boskovic, Dawson Baker and Dallin Hall.

And just as important, if not more, his staff is attacking the transfer portal for some help.

As fellow Big 12 brethren Texas Tech, Houston, Arizona, Iowa State and others proved, much can be added to a program with instant injection of transfer talent. BYU will now hunt for pieces that will make a difference next year.

Young told the media after the Alabama loss, he and ‘Bama coach Nate Oats share the same philosophy and their respective offenses were No. 1 and 2 in “efficient shot diets” this past season.

“He’s one of the, I think, few teams that spaces like we do. Now, obviously, like I said, they have more dynamic guard play than we had. So when you have that kind of spacing and that kind of dynamic guard play, it’s really, really difficult to guard,” said Young.

“But I think, for me anyway, it just kind of validates that that style of play is really hard to stop, especially if you can recruit to it, which they’ve done. And all coaches are thieves, man, so I’ll just continue to learn from all these really good coaches and try to be better next year and continue to build our program.”

Young just got BYU to the Sweet 16 for only the third time in school history.

He did it in 11 months, faster than Frank Arnold did in 1981 when it took him half a decade to assemble a squad with Danny Ainge and his supporting cast of NBA players Greg Kite and Fred Roberts.

Young did it faster than Dave Rose did in 2011 when he went to New York and got Jimmer Fredette to play in the backcourt with the best defensive player in school history, Jackson Emery — and it took him six years.

No, Young is fast-tracking BYU basketball at a pace nobody has witnessed before.

Young praised his team that he said “had to get out of the mud” with a 1-3 start in Big 12 play, but clawed its way to stacking wins at the end of the season to the Sweet 16. He credited his players for working their butts off to forge themselves into a force.

“The future at BYU is incredibly bright,” said Young. “I think anyone that pays attention to the sport would agree with that. This was obviously kind of a — just a statement, I think, this season, where it’s like, we’re a force to be reckoned with in the Big 12 and nationally, led by really good players that we had this year, and we’ll continue to try to bring good players in.”

Young called what is going on in Provo “exciting” to see unfold.

“It’s exciting to think about what we can build for our staff and me, who are new in this whole thing. We had a lot of learning we had to do and are still learning, obviously. But we feel like, foundationally, we’ve kind of put out a blueprint of how we want to play. I think our identity is clear.

“Now we’ve got to hopefully do a good job to continue to recruit to that identity and continue to try to bring in high-end talent so we can play with the teams who historically have played deep into this tournament. That’s our goal.”

What is the ceiling for Young in the months and seasons to come?

We got a glimpse before they bowed to Alabama in Newark.

After his team made 18 treys in a win over Iowa State, one of the country’s best defenses, you’d think a great goal next year would be to copy or exceed what Alabama did Thursday night.

Make 25 against somebody, perhaps in an NCAA tourney game, and get a third win on this stage.

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