Nebraska basketball freshman forward Colin Rice broke a bone in his right hand during a team workout and will miss the rest of summer practices, the team announced Tuesday. It’s a big setback for a freshman who had high hopes of getting serious playing time in 2026.
Rice will wear a splint for around six weeks before returning to the floor, in the hope that he’ll be able to resume full activity by late August. That does mean that he should be back well in advance of the regular season. That’s the good news. The bad is that he’s missing at least a month of very important development time. It also cuts into the time the big-time scorer will have to develop chemistry with his new teammates.
Developing chemistry in this new age of basketball is even more important. With Nebraska dipping into the transfer portal as much as anyone, there’s plenty of new bodies going through workouts this summer. Colin Rice won’t be among them for a very important six weeks at the least.
Rice committed to Nebraska in July 2025 before his senior year at Waukee (IA) Northwest High School, the alma mater of new teammate Pryce Sandfort. The 6-foot-9 wing averaged 12.5 points and 7.2 rebounds per game as a junior while shooting 37.8% from 3-point range and was the Iowa Gatorade player of the year as a senior.
Colin Rice injury delays Nebraska basketball freshman’s push for minutes
If this were any year prior, Rice’s injury wouldn’t be that big a deal because head coach Fred Hoiberg tends to like for freshmen to have a year to develop and get to know the college game. They tend to redshirt in hopes that they’ll get on the court more in their second season, ala Braden Frager during the 2025-26 campaign.
However, with the age-based eligibility rules changing to a 5-for-5 model, Rice won’t have to redshirt in order to have five years of eligibility. That could have led to him getting quite a bit more playing time than otherwise planned.
The Nebraska basketball team might have still mostly let him sit on the bench this year and only play junk minutes with the new eligibility rules, but there was always a chance he could show that he’s a freshman phenom. All of that has taken a rather big setback with the broken hand. The most important detail is that he might be back in six weeks, but there’s a chance he could miss quite a bit more time. For a player just entering college, that’s a bigger impact injury than a veteran Husker.
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