Not everything is football
At this moment, Nebraska basketball is what most Husker fans hope football can be every year. Let us count the ways.
Nebraska won its 25th game of the season Saturday, rallying and then routing USC in the second half for an 82-67 road win. It took a lot of hard work to make things look about as expected, which is becoming almost routine with this team.
But it’s completely foreign in another context. Husker hoops is having the season Nebraska football fans have been longing for over most of the past decade.
As a best practice, I’ve tried to avoid viewing one team’s success through another’s lens. That’s been particularly true if the lens was football, which is already omnipresent at Nebraska. Let basketball (or softball or bowling or insert team here) have its own success. Not everything is football.
I’m breaking that rule today because I think the comparison provides useful context for what we’re seeing on the court from Fred Hoiberg’s Huskers right now. And what we haven’t seen on the turf often enough of late.
As a top-10 team1 with two regular season games remaining, Nebraska basketball is a lock for the NCAA Tournament with a chance to climb as high as a 2-seed and little chance of falling below a 5. If you just port that to football, with its 12-team playoff, a top-10, power-conference team entering the final week of the season is likely in the field. Not guaranteed, but that’s the difference between 68 and 12.2
That’s not really a worthwhile comparison. The actual comparison isn’t really about results. Or at least not completely. It’s more about traits.
When I try to imagine what most Husker fans would say they wanted to see from NU football lately, the image I keep seeing is Jamarques Lawrence’s game-winner against Illinois or a Sam Hoiberg steal (all of them) or Pryce Sandfort’s jump shot (almost all of them). Those things are a what this team is. At least a partial list.
And I think most of what follows is what fans actually want from football when you get right down to it.
Never quit with a finishing kick
In-game win probabilities are a tricky thing, particularly in a high-volume game like basketball. Nebraska’s dropped as low as 35.6% on Saturday. If you watched the whole game you might think, “Well that seems crazy, the game was never out of reach,” and if you didn’t you might think, “Wow, how big was the comeback.” The answer to the latter is 7 points. USC maxed out its win probability with a 36-29 lead with 1:23 left in the first half. No basketball fan would consider a game over with their team down three possessions less than 19 minutes into the game, but the models are built on past results and somewhere on the servers they show that a good team down 7 right before the half on the road to a just-off-the-bubble team lost about two-thirds of the time. That’s at least more stringent than a writer like me telling you whether I ever felt the game was out of reach or not.
But the thing about Nebraska basketball right now is it keeps doing this. The Huskers’ win probability dropped to 28.1% late in the first game of 2026 against Michigan State, what would be a 58-56 win. Later that month NU’s in-game win probability dropped as low as 26.4% at Ohio State and 3% at Indiana. Nebraska won both to remain undefeated and, at the time, it was easy to think the Huskers were fortunate to have a zero in the loss column.
But that was before I went back and realized they did similar things early in the year in wins over Kansas State (as low as 26.5%) and Oklahoma (14.3%), way before we thought this team might contend for the title of best in program history. It was before USC, a lesser but additional example. Now I’m more likely to just believe this is what this team is—it’ll claw back, but it can also finish the job.
I’ve covered Nebraska football since 2011. Outside of a few occasions, I don’t have many memories of feeling a team “quit” over that stretch. But I have a lot of memories of teams that forged furious rallies only to lose in maddening but eventually predictable ways. This was basically the Scott Frost era in total, and it at least offered a lesson.
It’s one thing for a team to fight back when backed into a corner, but fighting back and winning is a separate skill.
Nebrasketball has the latter.
No slips
The “worst” of basketball’s four losses so far this season was the road defeat to Iowa, a team that ranked 24th in Kenpom as of Sunday. The other three losses—Michigan, Illinois, Purdue—were to teams currently ahead of Nebraska in those same rankings. Setting aside the rivalry context of the loss to the Hawkeyes, there’s been almost no shame when these Huskers have fallen short. The road loss to Michigan, where the Huskers were without two of their three top scorers, was maybe the most feel-good loss I can remember in any sport during my time on the NU beat.
The Huskers have outperformed the spread this season by an average of 3.7 points, which for me has nothing to do with bets and everything to do with trying to show what a team consistently exceeding expectations looks like. That number ranks Nebraska 16th nationally and it’s the second-best mark for a power-conference team, trailing Michigan (4.8).
Since 2023, Nebraska football has underperformed the spread by 1.5 points, 14th-worst among the 68 power-conference teams. Since the start of the Frost era it’s 1.8 points, eighth-worst, and back to the start of the Mike Riley era it’s 2.3 points, second-worst.
This also has nothing to do with bets and everything to do with trying to show what a team consistently falling short of expectations looks like, but at least you can say Nebraska football is getting closer.
Nebrasketball is there.
Wins of note
If we’re being honest about Nebraska’s basketball résumé, it isn’t stacked with huge wins. By WAB, the road win over Illinois was the biggest followed by the consecutive away victories over Ohio State and Indiana. But the losses, given the quality of the opponents, haven’t been that costly. Overall, Nebraska is 8-4 against Quad 1 teams and 17-0 against everyone else.
I’m generally someone who rebels against the famed Bill Parcells line of “you are what your record says you are,” but in the case of this Nebraska basketball team, it’s true.
And you already know how football compares here. It’s helpfully mentioned on every broadcast of a game against a top-25 opponent, where the Huskers have lost 30 straight since beating No. 22 Oregon in 2016. They also are what the record says they are after at least Week 8 of the 2016 season and more likely since at least 2015.
Nebrasketball had bigger wins over that same stretch, but they often felt like one-offs. This year, they feel earned.
So, if we were simply to map the basketball traits we’re witnessing right now to football’s tough 2026 schedule—and we’ve come too far not to—what are we looking at?
Probably 9-3. Nebraska would need to win one of the Indiana, Oregon, Ohio State trio to check the big-game box. It could drop a game to, say, Washington or maybe at Illinois or at Iowa, as long as it played well. Probably best if it’s not the Hawkeyes given the recent history, the state’s average blood pressure and the general Iowa-ness of it all, so let’s call it Illinois or Washington. A road loss to the Illini is probably more tolerable, so the Huskers win close at home to the Huskies. That feels big and would give us our no-slips checkmark.
All NU would have to do from there is win the other nine games, some of them ugly and improbable, checking the fight-and-finish box.
I don’t know who needs to hear this—maybe it was just me—but that’s what Nebrasketball has done so far with two tough games left at UCLA and hosting Iowa with the postseason to follow. And it’s possible, given the other inevitable mention of any Nebrasketball tournament game, that the postseason is all that matters.
That was the other reason for reluctantly making this comparison—maybe it shouldn’t.
Depending upon where you look and when. New polls come out today, but the Huskers were 12th in the AP last week and 10th in the Coaches.
In addition to 56. This post is free and can now be used in elementary math classes. There is also a math play on words, so maybe we can get away with 6th grade English as well.