Fort Worth, Texas » By the time BYU and TCU took the court Saturday afternoon for a Mountain West Conference basketball game at the Daniel-Meyer Coliseum, it had already been decided that they would meet again Thursday in the conference tournament because of what happened in the league earlier in the day.

Maybe that explains why the No. 14-ranked Cougars acted for the first five minutes like some other team. Perhaps they wanted to give the Frogs a false sense of security, knowing that they would see them again in a far more meaningful game in five days.

But players off the bench such as Jonathan Tavernari, Michael Loyd Jr. and Charles Abouo blew that plan, rallying the Cougars from an early 14-point deficit to a record-setting 107-77 win in the regular-season finale for both squads.

Quipped TCU coach Jim Christian regarding the 18-4 lead his team jumped to: "At that point, we should have left."

So the No. 2-seeded Cougars (28-4, 13-3 MWC) will meet the No. 7 seeded Frogs at the Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas this week, knowing they won't enjoy the same kind of home-crowd advantage they had Saturday.

The announced crowd of 6,469 was about a 50-50 mix of Cougar and Frog fans, but by the time the game was winding down BYU fans had almost completely taken over, carrying on as if it was just another blowout win in Provo.

It didn't start that way.

The Frogs made their first seven shots en route to the two-touchdown lead -- sound familiar, Cougar football fans? -- and for a few brief moments it appeared Senior Night might be magical for Christian's crew.

Rose called a couple of timeouts to stem the tide, and during the second one he told his team that at the rate TCU was going, it would score 200. He asked if the Cougars really thought the Frogs were going to roll over and let them have an easy win.

"These guys are real competitive guys, and they were getting beat," Rose said. "TCU came out with a lot of energy, and a great game plan. We had a hard time getting the ball stopped in transition. They had really clean looks at the basket, and that kind of turned them on."

To the rescue came Jonathan Tavernari, who drained his first of five three-pointers to get the Cougars going. Jackson Emery's three-pointer with just over eight minutes remaining in the half tied it at 29-29, and pretty much from then on it was all BYU.

While being careful to not make it sound like an excuse, Emery and Charles Abouo both said that having to wait 10-15 minutes in the locker room while the Frogs honored their seniors disrupted them a little bit, caused them to come out flat.

"Their seniors came out, and they really wanted it, and they played really well, probably the best that they can play. We just were not ready to counter them yet, and finally after a couple of minutes we started settling down and playing our style of basketball," Emery said.

Tavernari led all scorers with 23 points (16 in the first half), part of a season-high 61 points for BYU's bench. Abouo added a career-high 22, also off the bench, and Emery chipped in 22 as well.

Jimmer Fredette missed his first three shots and was benched early while pointless in favor of Loyd, but came back with 18 points and five assists in just 22 minutes.

The Cougars' 12th-straight win over TCU is its 28th overall win this season, tied for the most in school history. It was the biggest conference road win since a 103-68 win at Air Force in 1993.

drew@sltrib.com