Game Changers: AJ Dybantsa, BYU, and the Struggle for the Soul of Basketball

by Matthew Bowman, Wayne LeCheminant

In one of the most unlikely coups in college basketball history, a religious school in Utah signed basketball phenomenon AJ Dybantsa. He will play for Brigham Young University—hardly the sort of basketball powerhouse that typically attracts exceptional and non-Mormon players like him.

Game Changers explores how BYU managed this stunning feat. A year before signing Dybantsa, the university lured coaching star Kevin Young from the NBA to run its basketball program. In the decade before, court rulings and institutional reform put money at the forefront of college sports in ways the American public had never seen. And for generations before that, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints built a theological structure and institutional commitment to basketball that put the sport front and center at BYU.

Game Changers places Dybantsa in the context of this history and culture and explores the tensions in the sport. For Latter-day Saints and many other basketball fans, the sport is about personal discipline, character, and a commitment to success. But more and more, universities, the NCAA, and the professional leagues place money above everything else. These dual impulses have pulled the sport in general, and the church-owned BYU in particular, in opposite directions. The book reveals why Dybantsa decided to attend BYU and what he means to the sports world—in Provo, in the United States, and around the globe—as his career unfolds.

262 pages, Hardcover

Published December 15, 2025

About the author

Matthew Bowman teaches American religious history at Hampden-Sydney College, and serves as associate editor of Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon thought. He’s interested in evangelicalism, fundamentalism, religion and American culture and occasionally dabbles in Mormon history, noir, and the movies. He’s published in Religion and American Culture: a Journal of Interpretation, The Journal of Mormon History, the John Whitmer Journal, and the Journal of the Early Republic.

Reviews

[Malyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was interesting, but not what I expected. I thought that it would be much more about AJ Dybantsa than it was. It presented a history of basketball, particularly BYU basketball. Having lived through 50+ years of BYU basketball, I knew much of the story. While the book was well-written and researched, I was rather bored with much of this info. The section on Kevin Young and AJ were much more interesting. But I expected this to be much more of the book than it was. To some extent, I suspect that the authors wanted to capitalize on the AJ Dybantsa craze and be the first book out there for people to buy. Ok, they did that, but the reality is that there’s just not enough of a career for the story to make up a full book. Bottom line, I was a bit disappointed by the book.

[Dallas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great book of history related to basketball at BYU.

This is a pretty far reaching book of history. Several threads that come together in the history of BYU basketball are explored in a very interesting way. Congratulations to the authors.

[Brad Rees · Rating 3 out of 5]

2026 - Jan

We have a weird culture.