After sitting on the thought all season, BYU basketball coach Kevin Young finally let it out in the postgame news conference from the dais in Newark, New Jersey, and again to a smaller group of reporters in the hallway at Prudential Center after the Cougars were eliminated from the NCAA Tournament by Alabama’s otherworldly 3-point shooting.
Noting that he didn’t want to “speak out of both sides of my mouth” after saying all season that he was “not a big expectations guy,” Young decided it was the right time to acknowledge that, indeed, the 2024-25 Cougars did surpass what was expected of them.
“I told them in there I was proud of them,” Young said, pointing in the direction of BYU’s locker room last Thursday night. “This was a team that was picked ninth in the Big 12. And we end up being one of the last 16 teams in the entire country standing.”
Certainly, making the Sweet 16 for only the third time in BYU basketball history qualifies as a step in the right direction for the program that just two years ago finished No. 85 in the NET rankings and posted its first losing conference record since 2004-05.
A huge step, really.
Building upon the groundwork laid by
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