BYU will close out its regular season by hosting No. 10 Texas Tech at the Marriott Center on Saturday, March 7, with tipoff set for 8:30 p.m. MT. The game will be broadcast on ESPN, featuring Jon ‘Boog’ Sciambi and Fran Fraschilla as commentators.
The evening marks Senior Night for BYU, honoring four players: Richie Saunders, Mihailo Boskovic, Jared McGregor and Keba Keita. Collectively, these seniors have appeared in 277 games for BYU and contributed a combined total of 2,197 points, 1,108 rebounds, 245 assists, 201 steals and 142 blocks during their time with the team. They also played key roles in helping BYU reach the Sweet 16 last season for the first time since the 2010-11 campaign after victories over VCU and Wisconsin.
This matchup represents the ninth all-time meeting between BYU and Texas Tech and is their fifth encounter since BYU joined the Big 12 Conference. Historically, BYU holds a record of three wins and five losses against Texas Tech; their most recent victory came on December 17, 1993 in Provo.
Senior Richie Saunders would have faced Texas Tech for a fifth time had he not suffered a season-ending injury after playing in only 25 games this year. Over his previous matchups with the Red Raiders, Saunders averaged 13 points per game while shooting efficiently from both inside and outside the arc.
Texas Tech remains one of two teams that BYU has yet to defeat since joining what is widely regarded as one of the top men’s basketball conferences nationally. In their only meeting earlier this season, BYU led by nine points with nine minutes left but ultimately lost as Texas Tech finished on a strong run to win 84-71. Robert Wright III led BYU in that game with 28 points along with five rebounds and three assists.
BYU’s performance at home continues to be strong; they have amassed an all-time record of 665 wins and just 159 losses at the Marriott Center. Under head coach Kevin Young—now in his second year—the Cougars are currently posting an impressive home winning percentage of nearly 84 percent (26-5).
Freshman AJ Dybantsa has made significant contributions this season by scoring a total of 745 points across thirty games—ranking him ninth on BYU’s single-season scoring list—and averaging nearly twenty-five points per contest. He needs just seven more points to move past Jimmer Fredette (2009-10) into eighth place all-time for single-season scoring at BYU.
Dybantsa’s consistent high-scoring performances have positioned him among national leaders; he could become only the third freshman ever to lead Division I men’s basketball in scoring average if current trends continue.
Another emerging player is Aleksej Kostic who has recently increased his scoring output over the past three games while maintaining accuracy from beyond the arc. For this season overall he ranks sixth among freshmen in program history for three-point field goal percentage (minimum twenty made threes).
Head coach Kevin Young has accumulated seven career victories over Top-25 opponents—including two against Top-10 teams—with several notable wins occurring during March play such as last year’s NCAA Tournament upset over No.13 Wisconsin which secured a Sweet Sixteen berth.
A win against Texas Tech would give Young his second Top-10 victory this season—a feat not achieved by any Cougar team since Jimmer Fredette’s squad did so twice against San Diego State during the historic run in 2010-11—and tie him for third-most ranked wins by a head coach in program history alongside Mark Pope and LaDell Anderson.
Robert Wright III stands out statistically as well; should current averages hold through season’s end he would become just one of seven Cougars since at least the early ‘00s to shoot above thresholds of forty-seven percent from field goal range, forty-two percent from three-point range and eighty percent from free throws—all while averaging more than four assists per game.
Together Dybantsa and Wright III have scored a combined total of nearly thirteen hundred points this year—ranking them fifth among duos for single-season production within school history—and are among only seventeen pairs ever at BYU to each surpass five hundred individual points within one campaign.
