BYU gets its 10th win of the year.
In their first meeting with a former WCC foe since moving to the Big 12, the Cougars defeated Pacific 93-57 Tuesday night at the Marriott Center to move to 10-1 on the season and 59-22 in their current conference.
3 takeaways
BYU played far from its best game and still scored a 36-point win. Similar to many of the Cougars’ previous WCC clashes with Pacific, there was no shortage of sloppiness Tuesday night.
But even after shooting just 20% from 3-point range in the first half and allowing the Tigers to claw back within nine points after halftime, BYU did what it seemingly does best by orchestrating a late surge in the form of a 30-5 run to pull away for good.
In all, the Cougars shot 46.8% from the field and 39.3% from behind the arc. They scored 25 points from turnovers, won the rebounding battle by a 42-32 margin and made 24 of a whopping 27 free throw attempts.
The end result was BYU’s first Quad 3 win of the season — but of course, the Cougars already have six Quad 1 and 2 victories under their belt.
The “Brig 3″ dominated. Of BYU’s 93 total points, 69 came from the superstar trio of AJ Dybantsa, Rob Wright III and Richie Saunders.
Dybantsa recorded his first career double-double with 23 points and 10 rebounds, also becoming the first Cougars player with four straight 20-point games since Tyler Haws in 2015.
Wright scored 22 points with five rebounds, four assists and five steals, Saunders added a game-high 24 points, four rebounds, and three assists — along five steals in the first half alone.
Dybantsa, Wright and Saunders all shot a collective 21 for 37 (56.7%) from the field and were the first three BYU players to all break 20 points in the same game since 2020.
Tyler Mrus finally broke out. In BYU’s last outing against UC Riverside, Aleksej Kostić made a significant splash off the bench, hitting five 3-pointers and dishing out four assists.
But with Kostić unavailable Tuesday due to illness, it was Mrus’ turn to do some damage on the second unit.
The Idaho transfer scored 15 points and didn’t miss a single shot — he went 4 for 4 from 3-point range and 3 for 3 from the free throw line.
Prior to Tuesday, Mrus had been averaging 0.9 points per game and shooting 14.3% from long distance. Considering he was nearly a 40% 3-point shooter last year at Idaho, unlocking more production from him off the bench would be a major boost for the Cougars.