Fred Hoiberg ramps up Nebraska basketball practice intensity
Fred Hoiberg is all of us. He is also not happy about the Nebraska basketball team's level of effort or intensity when they play on the road.
The nice thing about Hoiberg not actually being one of us is that he can actually do something about his frustration rather than just writing article after article and tweet after tweet wanting something to change.
The question now is whether or not the changes the Nebrasketball head coach is making are going to work. There’s also a question as to whether or not the timing reeks of desperation. And a lack of answers as to what’s really going on.
Just ahead of Thursday night’s tilt against the Wisconsin Badgers, Hoiberg spoke to the media about his frustration. He told the assembled the reporters that this week’s practices have ramped up the intensity. They’ve ramped up the exertion. And he’s thrown the old road map out the car window.
He underlined that by announcing that Nebraska’s Athletic Performance Lab gave him a plan for managing his players’ physical exertion over the four days between the loss to Maryland and Thursday’s game.
“I crumpled it up and threw it in the garbage,” he said. “And I said ‘we need to go hard and we need to go physical.’ And that’s exactly what we’ve done the last three days.”
Fred Hoiberg ramps up Nebraska basketball practice intensity
“It’s been a very disturbing trend for our team,” the Nebraska basketball coach continued. “When things have gotten hard out there, we’ve gone the other way, and we’ve gotten softer out there on the floor, and you just can’t continue on with that and expect to have any type of consistency and expect to win, especially on the road.”
Those are words Husker fans are likely going to celebrate. We’ve all noticed that the team has not only lost on the road, but tended to do it in embarrassing fashion. They’ve done it by turning the ball over and getting killed on the boards.
Two questions do come to mind, though.
The first is the physicality issue, which has existed for a while. Why is the approach just changing now? The second is, why is this happening before a home game, against the sixth ranked team in the country?
One question that will get an answer on Thursday night is, will the Nebraska basketball team respond to this kind of ramping up so late in the season in a positive, or negative way?