- BYU's freshman forward turned March 2026 into a run of national honors, giving the Cougars a player the country already follows and a reason to matter well beyond Provo.
- AJ Dybantsa, BYU Men's Basketball connect back to Brigham Young University and the wider basketball picture.
- The story is backed by 3 sources and a visible last-verified date.
March 20, 2026
April 1, 2026
4 min / 953 words
3 official links
AJ Dybantsa closed BYU Men's Basketball's regular season as the country's leading scorer in a Cougar uniform, then spent the next nine days collecting the awards trail to match. Sporting News named him a First Team All-American on March 11, 2026. The Naismith Trophy committee placed him on its 10-player semifinal list on March 20. The Big 12 had already named him Freshman of the Year, and the Julius Erving Award — given to the nation's top small forward — went to him on the same March cycle.
By the time the awards calendar caught up, BYU's first season in the Big 12 had a national figure attached to it.
The freshman season, in numbers
BYU's official release credited Dybantsa with 25.5 points, 6.8 rebounds, and 3.7 assists per game over 35 starts. He scored 894 total points, second on the Cougars' all-time single-season list. He posted double figures in every game he played: 35 for 35.
Twenty-eight of those games went for 20 points or more. Eight crossed 30. Two crossed 40.
The biggest scoring nights came against the conference's bigger names. He went for 43 points against Utah — the second of the two regular-season Holy War meetings inside the Big 12 — and 40 in BYU's Big 12 Tournament game against Kansas State. He recorded a freshman triple-double against Eastern Washington and went for 35 points and 10 rebounds against Texas in the NCAA Tournament.
The shot chart matters as much as the totals. BYU's release listed him among the conference leaders in field-goal percentage despite the volume, and his three-point clip stayed in the high-30s through the conference run. That combination — high usage, high efficiency, no off games — is what moved his case from "best freshman" to player-of-the-year shortlist.
The Sporting News and Naismith timing
The two honors are nine days apart, and the order matters.
Sporting News went first. The publication's March 11 First Team All-America piece slotted Dybantsa alongside the country's most decorated upperclassmen — the only freshman on the first unit. That is the moment the national reset stopped treating him as a recruit who arrived with hype and started treating him as a peer of the league's veteran scorers.
The Naismith Trophy committee's March 20 semifinalist list followed. The award goes to the men's college basketball player of the year, and the semifinal cut is 10 names. Dybantsa joined that list as a freshman from a first-year Big 12 program, which is not a common combination on the Naismith shortlist in any recent year.
Together, the two announcements close out BYU's regular-season postseason in the same way the team's NCAA Tournament run did — with the conversation centered on one player.
Brockton to Hurricane to Provo
Dybantsa is from Brockton, Massachusetts. His prep year was at Utah Prep, the basketball program based in Hurricane, Utah, which became one of the country's busiest national pipelines for top-100 recruits in the early 2020s.
The Utah Prep route matters here. Dybantsa is not a Utah-developed player in the same way a Lone Peak or American Fork product would be, but his last competitive season before college was inside this state. The school's national reach is part of what made the BYU signing possible — a national recruit who had already spent a year close enough to Provo for an in-state college program to land him over the Power-Four field that pursued him.
It also gives the state's basketball map a new line. Utah Prep has now produced an All-American freshman inside Utah's borders. The high school is roughly four hours south of the BYU campus, but for the purposes of the recruiting story, it counts as the in-state stop on the route.
The Big 12 first-year context
BYU joined the Big 12 in 2023-24, which means 2025-26 is the program's third year in the league and Dybantsa's first. He arrived as the most-anticipated single signing of head coach Kevin Young's class, and BYU's release framed the season around what the freshman would do against league competition with NBA scouts in attendance.
That framing held. NBA scouts attended every home game and most road dates, per the program's media notes. Big 12 opponents adjusted defensively after the first round of league play, and Dybantsa's scoring did not slow — his second-half conference numbers stayed above his season average. The 43 against Utah came in the back half of the schedule, after every Big 12 staff had a full report on him.
The Cougars' team record also improved through the league portion. BYU finished above .500 in the Big 12 and reached the NCAA Tournament, which is what gave Dybantsa the Texas game on his postseason ledger.
What's next
The awards calendar runs into early April. The Naismith Trophy winner is announced at the Final Four, and the National Association of Basketball Coaches names its Player of the Year inside the same window. Dybantsa is on the Naismith ballot among the final 10.
After that, the calendar shifts. The NBA Draft early-entry deadline arrives in late April, and any underclassman declaring without an agent has until late May to withdraw. BYU has not commented publicly on Dybantsa's plans, and Dybantsa has not addressed the calendar in any program release as of March 20.
What BYU's record now contains is a full freshman season from one of the country's most-tracked young players, sourced to the Cougars' own releases: 25.5 points per game, 894 total, an All-Big 12 first-team selection, a Big 12 Freshman of the Year award, a Julius Erving Award, a Sporting News First Team All-America, and a Naismith Trophy semifinal nod. The next entry on that ledger will come from the draft calendar, not the college schedule.
