PROVO, Utah — AJ Dybantsa’s smiling face greets guests to the bookstore inside BYU’s Wilkinson Student Center instantly in the guts of campus.
Stacks of cream-colored T-shirts for sale characteristic his countenance, together with the No. 3 the freshman sensation wears for the Cougars, his scribbled AJ autograph — and 5 small stars. Underneath, there’s a quote from when the nation’s No. 1 recruit shook up the college basketball world in December 2024 by declaring on ESPN, “It’s just for the bigger picture,” happening to decide to a program unused to accumulating generational expertise.
Less than a 12 months and a half later, as Dybantsa enters what can be his one and solely expertise with March Madness, these phrases function an echo for the player and this system in the center of attempting to assimilate into the established elites of the game.
Dybantsa is the highest-profile proof of the new stage of ambition at BYU, which is owned and backed by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The athletic division has leaned into the era of identify, picture and likeness and income sharing, difficult assumptions about BYU’s limitations whereas additionally having to reconcile the mission of the LDS Church with spending huge to win.
“I think BYU’s always wanted to be able to prove they can play with the big boys,” stated BYU coach Kevin Young.
Landing Dybantsa from his hometown of Brockton, Mass., gave the Cougars a shot. Reports of Dybantsa’s single-year NIL compensation have oscillated from $4 million to $6 million, believed to be among the many high paydays for a player so far. While Young declined to determine the precise quantity, he stated Dybantsa might’ve made extra had he chosen to signal elsewhere with extra storied packages.
Young was employed in April 2024 after spending 5 years on the Phoenix Suns employees. To even be in the combination for gamers of Dybantsa’s caliber, Young vowed to run BYU basketball like a skilled franchise, inspiring a new stage of dedication from followers and, most significantly, the deep-pocketed boosters. Some of them come from the so-called Silicon Slopes, a hotspot for tech firms and startups between Salt Lake City and Provo.
Dybantsa, a 6-foot-9 ball-dominant player, grew up idolizing the easy scoring nature of his favourite player, Kevin Durant. He’s main college basketball in scoring (25.3 factors per recreation), performed everything of a recreation 5 occasions in the previous month alone and poured in 40 factors final week in BYU’s Big 12 event opener. He is anticipated to be one of many first three picks in the NBA Draft and has NIL offers with Nike, Red Bull and Fanatics.
His rarity and the brevity of his time on campus makes this NCAA Tournament look one overflowing with intrigue. The Cougars (23-11, 9-9) earned a No. 6 seed in the West area and will face No. 11 seed Texas on Thursday in Portland, Ore.
BYU struggled down the stretch after beginning the season 17-2 and being ranked as excessive as No. 7 in the nation. The Cougars misplaced starter Richie Saunders to an ACL tear on Feb. 14, have floundered defensively and want extra assist for Dybantsa and secondary star level guard Rob Wright III.
“When you bring in a kid like AJ, people automatically think, ‘Final Four or bust,’” stated Jimmer Fredette, the 2011 nationwide player of the 12 months who fueled one among BYU’s three complete Sweet 16 runs along with his depth-defying 3-point vary. “With injuries it’s obviously been difficult, but people don’t temper expectations overnight.”
Expectations are a byproduct of not solely emotional buy-in from BYU’s fan base, but additionally the funding made to create a program dwelling to star recruits worldwide.
In the times after he was employed, Young hosted a dinner in The Annex, BYU’s basketball follow facility. It was a precedence. To high-level boosters, he laid out his imaginative and prescient of constructing a employees, however most crucially, how he would change the extent of recruits BYU might go after and even signal.
“I think it spoke the same language as a lot of the people that support this place,” Young stated.
In Kevin Young’s first season, BYU made this system’s third-ever Sweet 16 and went 26-10. (Chris Gardner / Getty Images)
Young informed The Athletic final week in Kansas City that BYU’s revenue-share wage construction for its roster this season featured an strategy comparable to what’s finished in the NBA: max out three gamers — Dybantsa, Wright and Saunders — and spend the remaining quantity of your allotment on the remainder of the roster. Wright, a former five-star highschool recruit, is reportedly making $3 million this season after he left Baylor for BYU.
“What we did wasn’t that much rocket science,” stated Young, who just lately pushed again on the narrative that BYU is writing clean checks.
The college says its NIL strategy has been fast and strategic and that its spending is sustainable. BYU’s strikes have nonetheless furrowed brows throughout the college basketball institution.
“There was a lot of discussion about being at the top,” stated BYU vice chairman Keith Vorkink. “I think, for one, the fact that we were in the game shocked some people that we would even participate because we’re a faith-based university.”
Whether BYU ought to be investing in splashy athletic services and paying its coaches high greenback spurred handwringing amongst church leaders in latest many years, in keeping with Patrick Q. Mason, chair of Mormon historical past and tradition at Utah State University. In a podcast appearance final 12 months, Elder Clark G. Gilbert, the previous commissioner of the church training system, stated he didn’t need BYU to get into the enterprise of being the very best bidder at any price for gamers. Gilbert was confirmed as a member of the Church’s Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in February.
“We can never become a pay-for-play culture,” Gilbert stated on the podcast. “We would undermine everything at BYU if that comes out. It is tempting to buy one player at a time. If they don’t fit the mission, it would unravel everything.”
Athletes at BYU are a part of a distinct tradition. The said mission of BYU Athletics is about Jesus Christ and inspiring others by residing His values. Faculty, coaches and college students should signal and abide by the school’s honor code, which requires they abstain from premarital intercourse, alcohol, medication or vaping.
When requested what his favourite class was, Dybantsa routinely informed TV announcers in manufacturing conferences it was his Book of Mormon class, a requirement for BYU college students to satisfy a spiritual programs requirement.
“I just got to respect the rules, just like when you’re back home: You got to respect the house rules,” Dybantsa informed The Athletic.
It was as soon as thought of a stiff problem to recruit a steadier stream of non-LDS athletes to BYU; that’s not the case. The college even touts its honor code as a energy for athletes who need a distraction-free tradition.
But when the code is allegedly damaged, it attracts scrutiny.
In July, beginning quarterback Jake Retzlaff withdrew from BYU and transferred to Tulane after a lady filed a civil lawsuit in May accusing him of sexual assault and battery. The lawsuit was later withdrawn. Retzlaff denied the allegations and stated the encounter was consensual. He reportedly might have confronted a seven-game suspension for violating the glory code. In November, BYU junior guard Kennard Davis Jr., a switch from Southern Illinois, served a two-game suspension after being arrested on suspicion of driving beneath the affect and marijuana possession.
But adherence to the college’s values hasn’t hindered the revenue-generating packages from increasing their recruiting horizons.
Under Young and football coach Kalani Sitake, BYU athletics is an possibility for all blue-chip recruits, not simply Latter-day Saints. In Young’s fewer than three years on the job, BYU has landed three commitments from five-star gamers — former guard Egor Demin (a lottery decide in the 2025 NBA Draft), Dybantsa and incoming recruit Bruce Branch III — none of whom are LDS.
From 1999 to 2023, each BYU beginning quarterback had ties to the Church. BYU’s beginning quarterbacks in latest years have been Jewish and Catholic. In 2022, beneath former head coach Mark Pope, BYU basketball fielded a complete beginning 5 of non-LDS athletes for the primary time in college historical past. Dybantsa is Catholic. Wright is Christian, however not LDS. And, this 12 months’s BYU roster has six worldwide gamers, persevering with a development set in motion by Pope earlier than he took the job at his alma mater, Kentucky.
A extra welcoming presence to outsiders from the LDS Church has, in keeping with Mason, allowed BYU to develop its attain and permit its athletics division to regulate. There aren’t sufficient elite LDS athletes to have the ability to compete on the Power 4 stage on membership alone.
“You cannot have a 90 to 95 percent LDS roster in today’s college athletics,” stated Mason. “And that lines up nicely with the theological shift within the Church where the Church is much more comfortable with people of other faiths or no faiths at all, which was not the case as recently as 30 years ago.”
While no money is appropriated from the Church to the BYU athletic division, there stays cultural affect from the highest down. Mason stated the “fork in the road” was not ignored when, after a decade as an FBS impartial in soccer and a decade in the West Coast Conference basketball footprint, BYU joined a energy convention in the Big 12 in 2023. The transfer hasn’t come with out its challenges. The BYU soccer and basketball groups have received derogatory chants concentrating on the LDS Church at venues of 4 convention opponents.
“It was a fork either toward irrelevance on the national stage or to prominence,” Mason stated. “But the only way to get to prominence was through big money, and it just so happened that now over the past half-century, Latter-day Saints have become one of the more affluent minority groups in the country.”
That has labored in tandem with the explosion of Utah’s native financial system in the previous decade, highlighted by the realm throughout the Wasatch Front that options greater than 1,000 tech firms and startups, together with firms comparable to Adobe, Oracle and Microsoft opening workplaces or campuses. Utah Jazz and Utah Mammoth proprietor Ryan Smith is a billionaire BYU graduate and has been a staunch supporter of BYU athletics.
Like Dybantsa, there are nonetheless T-shirts of Fredette being bought in the BYU bookstore. When college basketball followers consider BYU, they consider Fredette launching from simply inside half court docket. Fredette stated when the NIL era started in 2021, he had a number of rich donors attain out to him prepared to assist launch this subsequent part of BYU basketball.
“Everyone told me, ‘I cannot wait to put an imprint on these programs,’” Fredette stated.
In February 2025, one BYU alumnus and donor told ESPN, “You’re not going to outbid us.”
Recently, BYU’s donors as soon as once more flexed their muscle mass, serving to to retain Sitake, who on the eleventh hour spurred a profitable contract provide from Penn State. Jason McGowan, the founding father of Crumbl cookie, a Utah-based dessert chain, informed The Athletic donors went to “very substantial” lengths to maintain Sitake and members of his employees in Provo after reaching the Big 12 title recreation.
These are the final days in BYU blue for Dybantsa, who has lived as much as the hype and might make the Cougars a tempting darkish horse for some bracket connoisseurs.
BYU is enjoying in its thirty third NCAA Tournament however nonetheless on the lookout for its first Final Four. The Cougars final made an Elite Eight run in 1981 behind a star guard with a bowl minimize named Danny Ainge. They made the Sweet 16 in Young’s first season final spring.
Dybantsa’s long-stated targets for his time at BYU embrace successful a nationwide championship.
“I’ve got to go win six (games) in a row,” he said last weekend on “The Winning Formula” podcast.
Building off what Dybantsa has already completed this season, Young and his employees landed their third five-star recruit in as a few years earlier this month. On March 4, Branch, a 6-foot-7 prospect from Gilbert, Ariz., introduced his resolution reside on ESPN.
He unzipped his jacket to disclose a royal blue BYU jersey No. 3 — similar to Dybantsa.
