After returning to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2021, BYU suffered another devastating loss in the first round, falling to the Duquesne Dukes 71-67. This loss marks the five straight NCAA Tournament appearance without making it past the round of 64. The last time the Cougars did that was back in 2011 when they made it to the Sweet Sixteen.
Our inaugural Big 12 season comes to an end.
— BYU Men's Basketball (@BYUMBB) March 21, 2024
A team picked to finish 13th in the Big 12 Conference goes 23-11 and makes it back to the Big Dance.
Grateful for Cougar Nation cheering us along every step of the way 🤙 pic.twitter.com/7AhKUvo5Y4
So what went wrong exactly? How did a team that was picked to finish 13th in the Big 12 that made it to the NCAA Tournament fall apart so easily? Well when asked after the game, senior Spencer Johnson could not come up with an answer.
"I don't have a good answer for that, it is just kind of how the game went and I don't know, I felt like we did a good job of battling back and we put ourselves in some good situations and then we ended up hurting ourselves sometimes," Johnson said.
Jaxson Robinson, who was named Big 12 Sixth Man of the Year, came off the bench to score 25 points and seemed to be the hot hand for the Cougars. He was integral in the Cougars coming back and even taking the lead late in the game.
It was mind-boggling when watching the game and in the last five minutes, the team's leading scorer whom Duquesne never found an answer for, never touched the ball. How does that even happen? Robinson tried to answer that question the best way he could.
"Just taking in the offense, just taking whatever the defense gives me," Robinson said, "my teammates were finding me open shots."
It seemed like everything in the offense was running through Robinson until it suddenly wasn't. The Cougars were forcing shots and had bad turnovers. We all know the term "feed the hot hand," and apparently they chose to starve Robinson in the last minutes of the game.
It was evident that this team was defeated in the end, you could see it in both Robinson and Johnson's faces during the post-game press conference. Head coach Mark Pope did his best to console his guys, but after a loss like that, I can imagine nothing will make that feeling go away.
"It's a terrible time, just seeing the locker room universally devastated and there is nothing to do to fix, there's not another game to go make it better," Pope said. "It's been beyond incredible and just profoundly sad that it's over."
This one is going to sting for a while for this team and their fans. Success in the NCAA Tournament seems to be a foreign concept right now this BYU and they have to figure something out soon because fans won't wait much longer.