The Nebraska Cornhuskers basketball team looked like it was going to cruise to a Big Ten opening win. And then they completely and utterly collapsed.
Not long after the Nebraska Cornhuskers basketball team got run off the court by Creighton, head coach Fred Hoiberg made a lot of comments about how we’d see what his team was all about in their next game.
Welp.
After going up by as many as 17 just before halftime, the real Nebraska Cornhuskers might have shown what they’re made of in the second half. You certainly hope that somehow, it was the second straight anomaly.
Because if a team that got outscored 52-26 in the second half by a Minnesota Golden Gophers team that didn’t have its best player for all but seven minutes of the game is what this team is, it will be a loooooong season.
Dawson Garcia sprained his ankle two minutes into the contest. He briefly came back at the end of the first half, but could not play after sitting through halftime.
It didn’t matter. Just think of what would have happened if he’d played.
It’s not hard to tell why Hoiberg’s Heroes lost on Wednesday night. After shooting 58 percent in the first half, Nebraska shot 29 percent in the second half. They were 2-for-12 from beyond the arc after the intermission.
Oh, and 12 of their season-high 18 turnovers came in the final 20 minutes.
Meanwhile, after hitting just 34.6 percent of their shots in the first half, the Gophers hit 59 percent of their shots in the second.
Nebraska Cornhuskers basketball has another terrible half
Four days after losing by 29 points to their in-state rival, a game that the Huskers tried to claim was just a one-off, they looked quite a bit like that team in the second half in Minnesota.
It’s officially a problem.
Especially for a team that scheduled seven cupcakes to open the year. It’s starting to look like that schedule means one of two things:
- This Nebraska Cornhuskers team is actually pretty bad, and that was masked by weak opponents
- This Nebraska Cornhuskers team is better than it’s looked the last two games, but wasn’t ready for real competition because of weak competition early on.
The the former answer is the correct one, it’s going to be an incredibly long march to the end of Fred Hoiberg’s Nebraska basketball coaching career. If the latter is correct, Hoiberg needs to figure something out fast.