Coming into Friday's slate of Big Ten Tournament games, the biggest question of the day was, "is it better to have fresh legs from the triple bye, or better to have played at least one game coming into the Quarterfinals?" Unfortunately for the Nebraska basketball team, having at least one game under your belt is helping the lower seeds give the higher seeds all they can handle.
While the 1-seed Michigan Wolverines managed to win their first game of the Big Ten tournament, it looked in doubt until the final minutes. In fact, what should worry the Huskers the most is that "fresh" teams in both the first and second games of the day took big leads to open the contest and then faded down the stretch.
Nebraska can look at the Wolverines taking a 29-18 lead in the first half over the Ohio State Buckeyes and then struggling to hold it the rest of the game. OSU, in fact, finished the first period on a 17-10 run to trail by just 4 at the half.
Nebraska basketball tips off against Purdue after watching the triple-bye trend go sideways
With five minutes to go in the game, the Buckeyes finally took their biggest lead of the game, a 62-60 edge that had Michigan looking like they might get toppled in the Quarterfinals. Eventually, the Wolverines staged an 11-5 run in the final minutes to get the 71-67 victory.
Things shifted even more when Illinois took on Wisconsin in the second game of the day. The Illini looked like they were in total control after a back-and-forth first half saw them leading 36-30 at the break. In the second half, Illinois pushed its advantage to a game-high 60-45 lead with 15 minutes to go in regulation.
However, from there on, Wisconsin (which had to gut out an 85-82 on Thursday night) finished the second half on a 33-18 run that eventually sent the team to overtime. Both of the second-half runs by the lower seeds seem counterintuitive when talking about the Michigan and Illinois teams that haven't played since last Sunday and have fresh legs. And yet Wisconsin went one step further and punched their ticket to the B1G semifinals with the overtime 91-88 victory.
The struggles also can't be chalked up to being rusty, as both of the triple-bye teams started off well enough and held solid leads early enough in their contests. The most obvious conclusion that can be drawn from the first two Big Ten Quarterfinal games is that both Ohio State and Wisconsin were just more ready for the rock fight, as they'd engaged in one already this week.
Nebraska will be the third triple-bye team that will attempt to buck the odd Friday trend. However, there are some differences in their matchup with Purdue. The first is that the Boilermakers weren't really tested in their first game on Thursday. They managed to knock off Northwestern 81-68 and, in fact, blew out the Wildcats for most of the game.
The second big difference is that while Nebraska is the 2-seed and Purdue is the 7-seed, the Huskers are still underdogs by 3.5 points. They are, in fact, the only higher seed in the Big Ten Quarterfinals to be underdogs on Friday. The switcheroo in NU's first game of the tournament may lead to a different outcome in favor of Fed Hoiberg and company.