Nebraska Basketball: Something Rotten In The State Of Denmark After Andrew White Departure
There’s no way to sugar coat Nebraska basketball’s loss of Andrew White.
Losing a 5th-year senior player who was your best returning player, by a long shot, is bad for any program. The fact that Nebraska has seen a variation of this movie the last few years means there seems to be something wrong with the program.
Andrew White made Husker fans quite happy in May when he announced he was not going to go pro after all and was removing his name from the NBA Draft. Even then, the most savvy among us wondered if something wasn’t up. It seemed that if Andrew White really wanted to be a Nebraska Cornhusker he wouldn’t have waited quite so long to announce he was coming back.
This wasn’t a guy, no matter how bad he wanted it to be, who was going to be drafted. He’s a very good college player who has a lot of developing to do before he plays in the NBA. Perhaps the message he received over and over again was he wasn’t going to be doing that developing at NU.
Whatever the reason, on Saturday evening, White announced through a text to the school’s athletic director that he wanted out of his scholarship so he could transfer and play somewhere else this coming season. The way he chose to leave may speak volumes about the Tim Miles era.
This is the second player to leave the team this year, with Bakari Evelyn bolting for Valparaiso earlier this spring. More importantly, White is following in the footsteps of Terran Petteway in leaving the Huskers when he had another year to show his stuff to NBA scouts.
Petteway decided to leave college altogether and go to the NBA instructional league but the result was the same. The Nebraska basketball team was suddenly losing a key weapon it expected back and it expected to make a run at the NCAA tournament thanks to the return of that weapon. Player turnover is a way of life in college basketball these days, but NU is hemorrhaging players at a rate that it doesn’t seem able to shrug off.
It’s not just players that are leaving Tim Miles either. The NU basketball coach has had to replace assistants at a rate of almost one per year. All of these departures taken on their own seems to just be the way life is for a college basketball program. When you look at all the changes as part of a larger group, one has to start wondering just how much longer Tim Miles has at the school.
When Miles first arrived at NU, he seemed to be a breath of fresh air. He was able to recruit and he was able to lure in some rather talented transfers. He also seemed to be quite likable and it was that trait which we thought was going to translate into winning basketball.
He got his team to the NCAA tournament quicker than most expected and in some regards, it appears that was the worst thing to happen to the coach. Since that NCAA tournament appearance, the Huskers have been treading water at best and going backward at worst.
Considering the talent that is coming in this season, including a true freshman center who was finally going to give the Huskers a big man, big things were expected with Andrew White returning. Now, this season looks again like a rebuilding year.
One has to wonder just how many rebuilding years the Cornhusker program can withstand before it’s time to look elsewhere. The team has the facilities it was lacking the past decade. It has a fan base that desperately wants to cheer on a winner, the sellouts at the PBA show that. Yet another rebuilding year, this far into Tim Miles administration seems to indicate his seat should be red hot this year.
Next: Nebraska Basketball Finally Has a Big Man, But Will He Play Right Away?
Another bottom of the conference finish would indicate something truly is rotten in the state of Nebraska and the basketball team might need changes in order to flush that rot out.