When BYU reached the WBIT championship game last week, the Cougars matched up with a Columbia team that couldn’t have been more different from them.
Statistically, the Cougars and Lions did share some commonalities, each scoring nearly the same amount of points per game and posting similar shooting and turnover numbers.
But Columbia lapped BYU in perhaps the most crucial category for success in a postseason setting: experience.
The Lions’ best players were juniors and seniors who had played together for their entire college careers, reaching two consecutive NCAA Tournaments in 2024 and 2025 before slipping into the WBIT field this year.
BYU, conversely, was an underclassmen-dominant, rebuilding group that exceeded expectations in Lee Cummard’s first season at the helm of the program, catching fire late to earn the WBIT’s top overall seed.
Columbia’s grizzled veterans ultimately captured an 81-64 championship victory over the young Cougars, bringing an anticlimactic end to an otherwise very encouraging Year 1 of the Cummard era.
BYU finished 26-12, going 11-10 in Big 12 regular season and tournament play while reaching both the Final Four and championship game of a major postseason tournament for the first time in school history.
“We’ve done some really good things and set a good foundation or standard that we want to approach things by,” Cummard told the Deseret News earlier this week.
“I feel like we were spoiled with the group that we had this year. ... We have some really good things in place to have a larger core and even better core. We’re not starting from ground zero, schematically or culturally, we have things we can build on.”
However, in Cummard’s eyes, the season-ending loss to Columbia stands out for magnifying one glaring area for future improvement.
“We’ve just got to get tougher, just be a little more physical in how we play the game,” he said.
“... I think Columbia is the most physical team we played this year. Just their toughness of being first to the ball, they had urgency for almost anything. The game was out of reach, but just some of the toughness things, how they screen, how they cut, how they passed the ball, how they checked into the game and checked out, like, I was really impressed with their mindset.”
While the physical toughness wasn’t passable against Columbia, BYU’s mental toughness was hard to deny. Despite trailing by 27 points in the fourth quarter, the Cougars refused to be deterred by the lopsided margin, cutting the deficit to just nine points in the final minute before eventually taking the loss.
The comeback effort wasn’t enough to flip the end result, but it was something of a microcosm of BYU’s season as a whole.
“We got knocked on our rear end, and we responded in a way that shows kind of who these players are, and what this program’s about,” Cummard said.
After a Feb. 17 loss to Cincinnati dropped them to 17-10, the Cougars clicked better than ever down the stretch, winning nine of their final 11 contests.
“I think we got to a place near the end of the season where there wasn’t as much thinking and instead just more instinctual playing,” Cummard said. “That’s something you can build on as an individual player and as a program, where schematically, we know exactly what we do.”
But having better instincts doesn’t mean BYU can get complacent elsewhere.
Cummard noted that the Cougars have to be more efficient on offense, having shot 40% from the field and 30% from deep while coughing up more than 17 turnovers per game as a team.
“We’ve got to continue to take that jump,” Cummard said. “We’ve got to do it in a way that we don’t leave any doubt to the committee for getting into the NCAA Tournament.”
“I feel like we were spoiled with the group that we had this year. ... We have some really good things in place to have a larger core and even better core. We’re not starting from ground zero, schematically or culturally, we have things we can build on.”
— BYU coach Lee Cummard
Underclassmen players accounted for 74% of BYU’s scoring and 85% of its total assists, led by All-Big 12 First Team selection Delaney Gibb and standout freshmen Sydney Benally and Olivia Hamlin.
The Cougars will augment their returning core with a few high school recruits, returned missionary Kailey Woolston and whoever from the transfer portal can fit within what Cummard’s crew is building.
“I love hearing what (national championship-winning UCLA head coach) Cori Close said, when she talked about their talent being the floor and their character being the ceiling,” Cummard said. “I think that we can kind of feed off of that, where you get some continuity of a group that’s staying together, and add a few pieces, but build from within and kind of go from there.”
But seemingly nothing will benefit BYU’s continuity more than its postseason success this year, as the Cougars played in eight win-or-go-home games between the Big 12 tournament and WBIT, winning six of them. The value of such experience can’t be overstated.
Perhaps the Big 12 tournament and WBIT wins from this year will translate to NCAA Tournament wins for BYU in 2027.
“You can never simulate game reps. You can’t simulate tournament reps either in the Big 12 and in the WBIT, which can be better (opposition) in every game you advance,” Cummard said. “I don’t want to say the pressure mounts, but you can feel it, it’s just different. You get a higher-quality opponent, and going into that (WBIT) championship game, I felt it, so I can imagine the players felt what was on the line. You can’t simulate that, you can’t simulate the preparation for those type of meaningful games.
“I’m just glad that the work our group put in got rewarded. It kind of establishes a cause-and-effect mindset where if our inputs can be this, there’s a result, and if we can improve those inputs, we can go even further.”
