BYU Basketball: Time to thank Mark Pope for the tough non conference
By Adam Gibby
BYU Basketball’s loss to Pacific isn’t a tourney ending loss.
BYU Basketball just had one of the worst losses in program history. While the Cougars have certainly lost to worse teams, they may have never lost while having such a large gap in the NET rankings (about 275 spots!).
Most years this would be an automatic nail in a NCAA Tournament coffin.
Not this year.
Luckily, Mark Pope and his staff were able to put together a very strong non conference schedule that at the time looked risky and unnecessary. This included playing seven games against teams who played in last year’s NCAA Tournament along with SEC Vanderbilt and a sneaky good Missouri Southern team on the road.
While most of the country was playing quad three/four teams week in and week out, the Cougars were matching up with quad one/two opponents at least once a week and putting themselves in a spot to build a resume outside of conference play while most teams tried to build up wins and confidence to do the same during conference play.
In these games, the Cougars went 7-2 and put themselves in a spot to have a bit of slack in WCC play. This week, the Cougars used all of that slack with two losses to Santa Clara and Pacific. In most seasons, it may be time to call it a year and look forward to the future. This year, the Cougars are still very much alive and need to figure things out.
But will BYU’s non conference success be enough? It very well could be as long as the Cougars don’t have any more quad 3/4 losses and get at least one more quad 2 win.
Does it feel the like the sky if falling? Yes. But Mark Pope and this team built up some nice food storage and a bunker to make it through at least a little bit longer.