Shaken Cougars head out on East Coast road swing after stunning home loss to UCF

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — If their last two games have shown anything, it is that the BYU Cougars are one of the most unpredictable teams in college basketball — with or without injured star Richie Saunders, who underwent surgery for a torn ACL in Chicago earlier this week and has played his last game in a BYU uniform.

The No. 19 Cougars upset then-No. 6 Iowa State 79-69 last Saturday without Saunders, only to embarrassingly fall 97-84 to unranked UCF on Tuesday at the Marriott Center in Provo.

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Which of second-year coach Kevin Young’s teams will show up Saturday at also-struggling West Virginia? Tipoff at sold-out Hope Coliseum (capacity: 14,000) is at 3:30 p.m. MST and the game will be televised nationally by Fox.

Although it is mostly off the national radar — thanks to BYU’s late-season stumble and injury woes and WVU’s three-game losing skid — the clash does carry a lot of implications in the Big 12 standings, as BYU (8-7, 20-8) sits tied for seventh place with TCU and WVU sits tied for ninth with Cincinnati, the school the Cougars play on Tuesday in the Queen City.

“My confidence (level) is extremely high,” BYU freshman AJ Dybantsa said Wednesday night after the discouraging loss to the Knights. “We have a tough road trip coming up with Cincinnati and West Virginia, two really good teams. If we can win those games and come back home and take care of Texas Tech, I think we will be in a good spot heading into March.”

Those are big ifs, seeing as how the Cougars are 2-2 without Saunders and have generally not played well away from the Marriott Center the past four weeks. West Virginia is 13-3 at home, with wins over Cincinnati, Kansas, Colorado and Kansas State at home.

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Two weeks ago, the Mountaineers downed UCF 74-67 in Orlando, then turned around and fell 61-56 to last-place Utah at Hope Coliseum to start their three-game slide.

“They will be hungry,” Young said on his coaches show Wednesday night. “They need to keep beefing up their (postseason) résumé. It will be kind of a grind-it-out slugfest, a slow-paced game. That’s how they like to play. We will have to do a good job of imposing our will with our style.”

The Mountaineers will also be motivated, having lost all three Big 12 games to BYU, including two straight at home and a 77-56 thumping last March in Provo. The WVU ticket office announced on Jan. 29 that the BYU game was sold out, while tickets still remained for all of its other games.

First-year coach Ross Hodge already has his detractors in Morgantown, especially after the Utah loss.

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Meanwhile, Young said his messaging has been the same as it has been all season after arguably the most devastating loss in his tenure on Tuesday to UCF, as BYU trailed by as many as 36 points in the second half.

“I didn’t go in there today and blow their minds with any of the film I showed,” Young said. “They know the deal. They know why we won against Iowa State and why we lost against UCF. The challenge is (playing) consistently.”

Because WVU is No. 66 in the NET rankings (No. 64 in Kenpom), Saturday’s matchup is a Quad 1 opportunity for BYU. Chattanooga transfer Honor Huff, a 5-foot-10 guard from Brooklyn, leads WVU in scoring with a 15.5 average.

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In the overtime loss at Oklahoma State on Tuesday, WVU came back from a 14-point deficit in the second half to force OT, but ran out of gas. Huff had 20 points, while Treysen Eaglestaff had 18 and Chance Moore 14.

“We are a team that likes to get up and down (the floor), so definitely a contrast of styles,” said Young.

If nothing else, the game will provide another national showcase for Dybantsa, who is the sixth player in BYU history to score 700 or more points in a single season. He now has 702, with at least five more games to play.

“What he is doing, in my mind, every night is just more and more evidence that he’s the best player in college basketball and should be the No. 1 pick (in the NBA draft), and I don’t even think it is close,” Young said.