How Kevin Young turned BYU into a player in the college hoops universe

Kevin Young is receiving much attention nationally now that BYU has become an NIL player, signed potential lottery picks, and made lists for some of the country’s top high school players in the class of 2025.
It’s quite the rarified air conservative BYU is finding itself in. It goes against convention and, well, history.
BYU is listed among Arkansas, Kansas and Kentucky as the top four NIL programs in the nation, according to an anonymous CBS Sports poll of 100 college basketball coaches across the country.
That would appear, in the natural blue-blood pecking order of the game, a little unfathomable.
But, it is what it is when Young signed Russian five-star guard Egor Demin and Purdue-bound forward Kanon Catchings to go along with a handful of other much-sought-after transfer portal players.
Asked if he believes BYU has the No. 3 NIL program in the country, Young told reporters at an informal luncheon at Riverside Country Club this week that he didn’t know if that was so.
“I don’t know if anyone really knows,” he said.
Regardless, BYU’s NIL for basketball has turned heads. Young’s first recruiting class of 2024 is ranked 13th nationally and that is without Demin receiving a composite score. When and if he does, that class will likely move into the top 10, an area reserved for Duke, Baylor, Ohio State, Gonzaga and others.
In that survey, 76.3% of respondents said Arkansas had top NIL money, followed by Kansas (43.2%), BYU (30.6%), Kentucky (25.3%), Indiana (16.9%), Kansas State (13.7%), and Baylor (11.6%).
Young has the interest of the No. 1 high school player in the country in Utah Prep five-star AJ Dybantsa, who lives in St. George and will visit campus officially in October, the weekend of the BYU football game against Arizona.
Yes, it’s NIL.
But somewhere along the line you must credit Young, his relationships and his approach to make BYU a destination for players to prepare for the NBA. He has run his program as if it were an NBA team. The approach, the preparation, the workouts and the expectations are the same.
Young said there’s only one way he knows how to recruit at BYU and he does it like he’s done everything in his life. He’s reached high, swung for the fences, refused to lay up in front of hazards. In other words, to just go for it.
Young said growing up he lived in a mid-to-lower income family. His father was a traveling salesman. Young worked hard to get on a high school team, even harder to make a junior college team and get a scholarship. He then started at the bottom in coaching, slowly and methodically working his way up until he was coaching at the upper echelons of the NBA after being a head coach four times.
“It’s all I know,” he said.
When asked if BYU’s strict honor code was a barrier in recruiting high-level talent to Provo, he said not so far. He only had one prospect he really wanted that had an issue with the rules of conduct at BYU and passed to go somewhere else.
The honor code, he said, actually helps filter out prospects that wouldn’t fit or work. He asks recruits if they want to work toward being in the NBA or live the college life. So far, they’ve been choosing preparing for the NBA and don’t want the distractions.
“I haven’t run into a situation where there’s an honor code problem — so far.”
Young is remarkably knocking down a lot of barriers around Provo.
Critics have long sung that BYU was cheap, didn’t pay coaches and staff enough, and the honor code was an insurmountable hurdle that would keep the Cougars from ever building a program taken seriously on the national stage.
That he’s recruiting top-20-caliber players and they’re listening and visiting kind of robs the cacophony of distractors of BYU their favorite worn-out drone. “But, but, but … I hoped they were pulling the plug on BYU sports.”
Though Young has yet to coach a BYU game, he is stoking coal in the train’s boiler to head in that direction. Early indicators say he’s chalking up some mile markers and it’s impressive.
He’s getting talent despite critics saying BYU is, well, too BYU to attract that kind of player.
One of the most sought-after players over the decades was Shawn Bradley, a prospect who signed with BYU and then left on a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Australia. Roger Reid was the coach who signed him, and so many things, including his faith, were a huge part of that.
But now Young is bringing in players who’ve never heard of his school before, or if they had, they barely knew what state the school was located in. These guys don’t have church/faith guardrails to funnel them to Provo.
BYU, say Young’s peers, is now a player.
And that is quite remarkable, no matter how you paint it.