Can AJ Dybantsa Lead BYU to the Promised Land?
The Cougars have never made a Final Four, but with their best recruit ever — and a future NBA lottery pick — leading the way, this might finally be the season.
It’s a blessed time to be a fan of Brigham Young University sports right now. Though the football team lost its first game of the 2025 season against fellow Big 12 upstart Texas Tech last weekend, the Cougars are still 8-1 and ranked 12th in the latest edition of the College Football Playoff rankings — good enough for them to control their own playoff destiny (even if ESPN’s playoff predictor gives them just a 45 percent shot at the moment).
And the gridiron may not even be the biggest source of excitement in Provo right now.
That’s because the BYU men’s basketball team is currently ranked 7th in the AP poll, as it goes into this weekend’s big early-season matchup against No. 3 UConn in Boston. (Saturday at 7p.m. ET on FOX.) The game will be a showcase for the highest-ranked Cougars team since the height of the Jimmer Fredette era in 2011, and while the early forecasts have BYU as a clear underdog — ESPN’s BPI sets their odds at 35 percent — the Cougars have something the Huskies don’t: the No. 1 ranked prospect in the nation.
That player is AJ Dybantsa, the kind of multi-talented, 6-foot-9 forward with a feel for the game that is incredibly easy to fall in love with just by watching him play ball:
Right now, Dybantsa isn’t the player he will be by the end of what’s presumed to be his lone college season — much less what he’ll be in the NBA. His perimeter shooting needs work, as evidenced by the fact that his (very) early comps are almost all players who did the bulk of their work on the interior. But his ability to attack the basket, dribble, pass, rebound and score are already impressive.
And just as impressive is Dybantsa’s reputation as a blue-chip talent. According to the Recruiting Services Consensus Index (RSCI) rankings, a master composite of multiple different prospect-ranking lists, he was the No. 1 incoming recruit in the country this past offseason, beating out Darryn Peterson of Kansas and Cameron Boozer of Duke. (Not coincidentally, those three are the Top 3 NBA draft prospects on No Ceilings’ latest mock draft board as well.)
For programs like Duke and Kansas, having the nation’s No. 1 recruit is no big deal. The Blue Devils did it just a year earlier when they landed Cooper Flagg (among many other instances), and KU had Josh Jackson in 2016 and Andrew Wiggins in 2013.1 But for all the NIL money that has poured into BYU’s athletics department in recent years, Dybantsa represents a brand-new level of star power arriving on campus in Provo. Going back to 1998, when the RSCI rankings began,2 here’s a plot of all ranked prospects who played for BYU3 by year:
