BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — Here in the alternate universe, they met at high noon. Nebraska, forever a football school currently busy becoming a top-10 basketball power. Indiana, forever a basketball blueblood but now one win from becoming the capital of college football. What kind of topsy-turvy world is it when the Cornhuskers send a 15-0 team out for the opening tip and the Hoosiers will send a 15-0 team out to their next kickoff?
You want a school on a roll? Should the Indiana footballers finish the job against Miami, this place will own the last unbeaten national champions in both basketball and football.
So the irony was plain Saturday. Wandering into the middle of this supercharged Hoosiers karma was a Nebraska basketball team that has been breaking down its own barriers. The Cornhuskers brought with them the longest winning streak in the nation at 19, their first top-10 ranking in 30 years, first 11-0 record in non-conference since 1929, and a chance to start 5-0 in league play for the first time in 60 seasons and 3-0 on the road in the conference for the first time in a half-century. They aim to get to the postseason and do something about that 0-8 NCAA Tournament record, which has left them the only power league school without a single March Madness win. Indiana, on the other side of the tracks in tradition, has 68.
The Nebraska fan base, long accustomed to being on the outside looking in, has been waiting for this moment for eons, wondering if it would ever come. Know who that sounds like? Yep, Indiana football.
For a while Saturday, it looked as if the Hoosiers athletic program was going to have a truly remarkable 17 hours. Wallop Oregon in the College Football Playoff semifinals Friday night, knock Nebraska from the basketball unbeaten ranks Saturday afternoon. Indiana led by 16 points with under 17 minutes to go.
Five minutes later the game was tied. Nebraska ended up scoring 53 points in the second half and won 83-77. Perfection rolled on, and with Michigan’s passing, the unbeaten list is now down to five teams.
“It just shows that we don’t go away and we’re going to continue to keep punching. We’re not a team that’s going to roll over,” guard Cale Jacobsen said, mentioning the competitive tenor of Nebraska practices all summer and fall. “We’ve been in those moments where one team’s beating up on another one and you have to find a way, right? You’re either going to get stomped on all practice or you’re going to bounce back.
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“We’ve been working on how we’re going to respond since we got here. Maturity’s kind of a big word. We’ve got some old people in that locker room. They’ve been through big wins and big losses.”
Well, not any big losses lately.
Indiana has created its football fairy tale with a locker room of human interest stories that the nation only lately began to notice. Nebraska basketball is a most charming story, too. Coach Fred Hoiberg, manning the same post his grandfather once did, now with son Sam in his lineup. A generational family parade where they have paid their dues. Especially Fred, who has spent seven seasons trying to bring such glory to Lincoln, the town where he was born. It’s been a journey. The Cornhuskers went 14-45 his first two years.
The leading scorer, Rienk Mast, is from the Netherlands with a physics degree and a master’s. Next in scoring is Pryce Sandfort, a transfer in Nebraska by way of Iowa. There’s Jamarques Lawrence, who started his career at Nebraska, took a sabbatical at Rhode Island and then returned. He had a career high 27 points against Indiana Saturday. There’s a Husker from Turkiye, another from Lithuania, another from Iceland. Jacobsen, a key do-it-all sub, is a former walk-on and all-Big Ten academic selection from a small town just outside Omaha.
They had stayed inbeaten in all manner of ways, coming from 16 points down to defeat Oklahoma, blowing away Wisconsin by 30 and neighbor Creighton by 21, outgritting Michigan State 58-56, outscoring Ohio State 22-0 in bench points and shooting 51.6% with only six turnovers in a show of efficiency at Illinois.
“Happy for Fred Hoiberg. Not that many years ago, everybody was on his butt,” Tom Izzo said after his Spartans coughed up 19 turnovers against the Cornhuskers. “He did a hell of a job. Nebraska did a hell of a job. That was probably the best game, their biggest game in 36 years, they responded.”
They responded Saturday, too, with another comeback. The Hoosier fans poured in, many of them bleary eyed from watching football late into the night before. The 16-point lead seemed to confirm that all is magical right now in IndianaWorld. About the only problem seemed to be the announcement to the crowd that someone had parked in IU women’s basketball coach Teri Moren’s parking spot and the vehicle had to be moved, or else.
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But the Hoosiers had run into a bunch confidently building its own fantasy, one solid win at a time.
“There’s just no panic with this group. That’s the thing I’ve been most impressed (about). Their emotions are the same, their body language doesn’t change,” Hoiberg said. “We talk about that in this business. You have to be able to do that. You have to bounce back from the emotional wins and you have to get over the tough, hard losses. This team has continued to get over the wins. I asked them again if they’re satisfied. To a man they’re not.”
Just like Indiana football has had its skeptics until lately, Nebraska still has something to prove. Saturday’s win, with 83 points and only eight turnovers and 57% shooting the second half, was more progress.
“I’m not going to discount what our guys have done,” Hoiberg said. “But at the same time we’re not letting them get comfortable with this. We just went over the halfway point in our season today and we haven’t had a hiccup yet and that’s a credit to our guys. But at the same time you can’t get complacent, you can’t get fat and happy. As soon as you do that in this league, you’re done.
“Yes, it’s meant a lot to our team, to our program to put up some of these numbers that you’ve never seen in history. But we have a lot important in front of us. We’re going to keep grinding with this team…We’ve got to keep them hungry, that’s the bottom line.”
Didn’t Curt Cignetti just say that about his Indiana football team?
The two worlds blurred here Saturday, passing one another on the same campus. Hoiberg wanted to send Indiana football a message. “That was an unbelievable performance last night,” he said. “Good luck to the Hoosiers.”
From one program seeking to turn history on its head to another.
