BYU men's basketball, despite a stellar performance from AJ Dybansta, dropped their seventh loss of the season in Tucson, Arizona.
The No. 4 ranked University of Arizona Wildcats bested the Cougars 75 to 68 after a close battle between the two clubs.
Dybansta finished the game with 35 of the Cougars’ 68 points, but it wasn’t enough to come out on top.
BYU found themselves down by 16 at one point, but as head coach Kevin Young explained in the postgame press conference, they didn’t quit.
“We've just got competitive guys,” Young said. “I think we have a lot of belief in ourselves, not matter the situation we find ourselves in and that was the case tonight.”
Dybansta notched his sixth 30-point game this season, tying the single-season record for any player at BYU. He attributed his success to Richie Saunders, who suffered a season-ending ACL injury just a few days ago.
“I just tried to be aggressive early,” Dybansta said. “Obviously, Richie brings a lot of scoring and a lot of aggressiveness, so I just tried to mimic what he gave us and try to just instill it in my because we're down a guy.”
Young is now in his 22nd year coaching basketball and has never had more than four players go down with season-ending injuries. BYU now has seven players on the roster who will not see the court for the rest of the 2026 season.
“I never had four guys get hurt for the season you know, so we're going through it and that's part of going through sports; that's life,” Young said. “You hit adversity. And I'm so proud of our guys for their effort tonight and their effort in practice the last couple of days. We're trying to reinvent ourselves on the fly and I think there's a lot of good things that happened tonight.”
And while the Cougars’ season isn’t quite going the way Young expected, he says they are still going to fight until the buzzer sounds.
“I'm super disappointed we didn't get the win, but we've got a locker room that's not going away, I can tell you that right now,” Young said. “It is going to be a dog fight every time you play BYU. We're going to keep pounding the rock until it breaks, and it will break for us eventually.”
BYU’s tough schedule continues as they travel back home to Provo, where they host the No. 6 ranked Iowa State Cyclones on Saturday at 8:30 p.m.