Nebraska basketball loses a can't-lose, leaving only must-wins left

Yes, there is a difference.

Courtesy Nebraska Athletics

Remember that movie, “Nebrasketball,” I was raving about just three weeks ago? Full disclosure: I hadn’t watched the final 20 minutes—and I still haven’t watched the final 10—but it looks like this film has third-act problems. Might be trending more towards Razzie than Oscar, but I’ve learned my lesson. I’ll withhold judgement until I finish it.

Nebraska wasn’t playing a must-win against Minnesota in Lincoln on Saturday; it was playing a can’t-lose. There is a subtle difference. A must-win might only get you to the next must-win. Must-wins are the mark of a team that does not have the upper hand. On a scale of great-to-terrible, no team better than “pretty good” has probably ever faced a must-win in the regular season.

A can’t-lose, however, touches much closer to the bottom of the scale. Think of a team down 3-0 in a seven-game series. Game 4 can be called a must-win or a can’t-lose, but the can’t-lose is final and the must-win just sets up another must-can’t proposition. That’s the difference.

If your team is facing a must-win, be concerned. If your team is facing a can’t-lose, be very concerned.

That was Nebraska (then 17-12) as Minnesota (then 14-14) came to town. It was the most winnable game left on the schedule when the Huskers were flying (relatively) high three weeks ago, and that was still true with three games remaining and NU having lost three of its previous four since beating Ohio State.

The Gophers built a lead as large as 19, Nebraska rallied all the way back to take a 1-point lead with less than 10 seconds left and lost 67-65 on a 3 with 4 seconds remaining. That’s about as brutal as it gets in terms of stakes and the emotional rollercoaster it took to get to the end. The loss dropped Nebraska to 7-11 in Big Ten play and into a tie for 11th in the conference, guaranteeing the Huskers will finish with a sub-.500 record in league play for the regular season.

That’s not a good résumé item when it comes time for NCAA Tournament selection. The Huskers do have highlights on that résumé, but the lowlights are starting to stack up. Nebraska is 3-5 against the other eight teams with sub-.500 Big Ten records and needed big second-half comebacks to beat Northwestern and Washington (two of those three wins). The rally over the Wildcats is the only thing keeping Nebraska from a five-game losing streak, and this is a team that lost six in a row in January.

That’s making it easy on the selection committee in the wrong way. On the day it beat Ohio State, Team Rankings’ model gave Nebraska a 76% of making the dance and the Huskers were the biggest gainers (+39.4%) of that week. Over the last week, they’re the biggest losers (-39.9%) with a 47% chance of making the field. (Most other models are in a similar range.)

This is the good news—an NCAA Tournament bid might still be close to a coin flip.

The bad news? There are only must-wins left in the immediate future—at Ohio State Tuesday, home against Iowa Sunday—and that might even include at least a game in the Big Ten Tournament.

I guess that’s its own sort of good news, too.¹ Nebraska can still go out and do it on its own, but this isn’t the ending to the movie I expected.

Does it really always have to be this hard? That’s where fiction and reality diverge.

Odds & Ends

»Women’s basketball beat Northwestern 98-77 Sunday to close out the regular season, the Huskers third win in eight games since the start of February. It didn’t change the seeding for this week’s Big Ten Tournament, where the Huskers are the 10-seed and will face 14-seed Wisconsin on Wednesday.

»Nebraska baseball went 1-2 this weekend in the Frisco (TX) College Baseball Classic, beating Sam Houston on Friday but dropping games with LSU and Kansas State Saturday and Sunday. The 11-6 loss to the second-ranked Tigers particularly stung with the Huskers jumping out to a 5-0 lead after three innings, but they also have to face the Wildcats twice more this season for mid-week one-offs. Nebraska (4-6) next plays at Omaha Tuesday. The Mavs beat LSU two weekends ago.

»The first SP+ ratings for the 2025 football season arrived late last week from ESPN’s Bill Connelly. The Huskers were 34th with an 8.2 rating, which is probably the range in which we’ll see NU throughout the offseason. Using those ratings and Nebraska’s schedule to infer projected point spreads, which can then point to implied win probabilities, I have the SP+ ratings putting Nebraska’s expected win total at about 7.5, which is what I found earlier with a different set of rankings. FanDuel already has win totals out for Big Ten and, sure enough, the Huskers’ is at 7.5, but there’s even-money (+100) to the under which wasn’t the case a year ago. This year NU is priced in such a way that you’d need it to go over 7.5 wins 55% of the time to break even and under 50% of the time. This time last year that split was 45/62%. Translation: The oddsmakers view the over as the slightly more likely outcome in 2025.

1. In a more probabilistic sense, ShotQuality had this is as a nearly 20-point Nebraska win. I put a lot of stock in their numbers and if there were more season left I’d think, “Oh, get ready for a big bounce back,” but there’s not a lot of season left.