The Nebraska basketball team’s season might be spiraling into the ground, but there is at least one good thing they can make a claim on. That’s the fact that the Huskers played a very real role in the Purdue Boilermakers rise to the top of the Top 25 rankings.
In a season that has been disappointing, especially injury-wise for the Huskers, we’ll take whatever we can get. There’s a couple of different reasons why the Nebrasak basketball team should get a bit of credit for the Big Ten rival for being at the top of the heap.
The first is that the Huskers gave Purdue all it could handle when the two teams went toe-to-toe. Nebraska basketball ended up losing the game 65-62 in overtime and the Huskers certainly had their opportunities to win that game. It would have been a massive win for Nebraska and a massive loss for Purdue.
Hoiberg’s Heroes were coming off an upset over Creighton and had they managed to pair that with an upset against Purdue, there would have been real talk about Nebraska basketball being a potential tournament team. The Boilermakers on the other hand, would tumble from fourth to who knows where. They would have taken a hit to their ego and who is to say at that point they’d go on the roll they have since?
Nebraska Basketball Iron Sharpens Iron
It’s not a stretch to say that the Boilers learned how to “win the close one” against the Huskers. The overtime game was the closest contest of the season up to that point. Their closest game before that was a five-point win over Marquette.
Since then, Purdue has lost one game, a one-point defeat to Purdue, but they’ve also boasted a two-point win over Ohio State, a single-point victory over Michigan State, a 3-pointer over a surging Maryland and a five-point victory over Michigan.
Indeed, the Nebraska basketball team appears to have done Purdue a big favor as they gave the team a wake-up call on where they were as a team. As they open another week as the number one team in the country, I assume the thank you card is officially in the mail.