PROVO — Five-star freshman AJ Dybantsa’s official, on-court introduction to his new home fan base couldn’t have gone much better Saturday night.

And Richie Saunders? Well, the Riverton native was also happy to be home.

Saunders poured in 20 points, four rebounds, four steals and two assists; and Dybantsa added 17 points, eight rebounds, three assists and a block as No. 8 BYU rolled to a 98-53 win over Holy Cross in front of a sold-out, balloon snake-enthused crowd of 17,918 at the Marriott Center.

Kennard Davis, Jr. added 12 points and two assists for BYU, which shot better than 64% from the field until head coach Kevin Young began permanently pulling his starters within the final 10 minutes.

Baylor transfer Rob Wright III supplied 15 points, four rebounds and three assists for the Cougars (2-0). Perhaps there’s a concern that BYU’s starting point guard — as Wright has been touted, part of the team’s “Big 3” with Dybantsa and Saunders, certainly — accounted for just three of the host’s 20 assists (on 39 made field goals).

But eight players finished with multiple dimes, which — when paired with an overall 61.9% shooting percentage and just four offensive rebounds — tells more of the story of a team transitioning to play more position-less basketball than Young’s first season.

“It was like that last year a little bit, but I think we have a lot of guys who are a lot more versatile, and can get to the rim — and also shoot,” said Dawson Baker, one of six seniors on the team and the eighth-oldest player in NCAA Division I. “But I know coach Young likes that position-less basketball, and puts guys out there who can all shoot, dribble and pass. I think that’s the best way to play. It’s fun for all of us that can do that.”

Also different: BYU made just seven 3-pointers and took only 25. Does that mean the end of “3-Y-U”?

Not hardly. But it’s nice to not have to rely on the 3-and-D moniker all the time.

“I’m not just a straight shooter, and so I think it fits right to the mold of me,” said Baker, who scored 12 points on 4-of-7 shooting, including a pair of triples. “It’s fun to be out there with guys like that, like Rob and AJ, who can roll and get to the paint really easily.

“It’s a little bit different from last year, as you guys can tell,” he added. “But I’m sure there will be games that will demand more threes, and that will happen naturally. But we’ve been getting to the rim really well.”

Tyler Boston led Holy Cross (0-2) with 12 points.

The eighth-ranked Cougars did what teams with the investment — and preseason ranking — should do to a winless Patriot League squad in their home opener. BYU jumped out to leads of 17-2, 21-4 and 21-9 before Holy Cross hit double figures.

Saunders had 10 points on 3-of-4 shooting in just nine minutes, and tied Wright with a game-high 12 before the break.

Dybantsa added 11 points and seven rebounds in 15 minutes before halftime, including a dunk that brought the overloaded student section behind the basket next to the visiting bench to its feet.

It wasn’t perfect; the Cougars missed their first eight 3-point attempts before Baker drained a triple with 3:07 left in the half. But that was part of a 23-3 run that helped BYU salt away a 58-25 halftime lead before the Cougars led by as much as 46 points in the second half.

So what did Young learn from this game, which was — with all due respect — not the same level as BYU’s opener Monday night, a 71-66 win over Villanova in Las Vegas?

“I thought our defense was really good, and I thought offensively — we had moments,” Young said.

Nonconference play continues Tuesday when the Cougars host Delaware (7 p.m. MST, CBS Sports Network).

The Key Takeaways for this article were generated with the assistance of large language models and reviewed by our editorial team. The article, itself, is solely human-written.