Provo • After West Coast Conference basketball officials trimmed the league schedule and made some other changes last spring to keep Gonzaga from bolting to the Mountain West, BYU basketball coach Dave Rose and his staff added a couple more difficult games to an already challenging non-conference schedule in hopes of impressing the NCAA tournament selection committee.
Now comes the hard part. The Cougars have to win the majority of those games to get back to the Big Dance for the first time since the 2014-15 season.
“That’s the plan,” said Rose, who enters the 14th season of his head coaching career with a relatively experienced team centered around junior forward Yoeli Childs, a WCC Player of the Year candidate.