Nebraska Illinois Basketball
Nebraska head coach Fred Hoiberg shouts to his team during an NCAA college basketball game against Illinois, Saturday, Dec. 13, 2025, in Champaign, Ill. (AP Photo/Craig Pessman)
In late March 2019, Fred Hoiberg took the next step in his career, becoming Nebraska’s men’s basketball coach, a much less prestigious job than his former role. Nearly four months earlier, the Chicago Bulls had fired Hoiberg when the team won just five of its first 24 games. Still, the Cornhuskers weren’t put off by Hoiberg’s NBA struggles, knowing he had succeeded before in college and had strong ties to the school.
This season, Hoiberg has Nebraska off to the best start in school history and seeking to win its first NCAA tournament game. Yes, the Cornhuskers have been playing since the late 1800s and are the only Power 5 conference (Big 12, Big Ten, SEC, ACC and Big East) program to have never won a game in the NCAAs.
Nebraska (11-0) is one of only seven undefeated teams remaining in Division 1 and is No. 15 in the Associated Press poll, its highest ranking since January 1991. The Cornhuskers have won a nation’s-best 15 consecutive games dating to last season when they won the inaugural Crown postseason tournament.
On Saturday, Nebraska had its most impressive victory of the stretch, defeating then-No. 13 Illinois 83-80 on guard Jamarques Lawrence’s 3-pointer with 0.2 seconds left. It was Nebraska’s first road win of the season, although the Cornhuskers won the Hall of Fame Classic tournament last month in Kansas City, Mo. In the championship game of that event, Nebraska defeated Kansas State 86-85 when Sam Hoiberg (the coach’s son) grabbed an offensive rebound, drew a foul and made a free throw with 0.6 seconds remaining.
Sam Hoiberg, a 6-foot senior point guard, is one of four players back from last season, joining guards Connor Essegian and Cale Jacobsen and forward Berke Buyuktuncel. Hoiberg (8.1 points, 4.5 rebounds and 4 assists per game) and Buyuktuncel (7.6 points and 6.5 rebounds per game) are starters, while Jacobsen is a reserve. Essegian, the team’s leading returning scorer, sustained a knee injury late last month and will miss the rest of the season.
Rienk Mast, a 6-foot-9 senior who averaged 12.3 points per game as a starter in the 2023-24 season, missed all of last season after undergoing knee surgery, but he has returned to the starting lineup and is leading the Cornhuskers with 17.9 points per game. Mast played at Bradley for three years before transferring to Nebraska.
Pryce Sandfort, a 6-foot-6 junior forward who spent his first two seasons at Iowa, is second on the Cornhuskers with 17.1 points per game, while Braden Frager, a 6-foot-7 freshman forward, is next with 10.8 points per game. Lawrence, who is fourth on the team with 9.1 points per game, played his first two seasons for the Cornhuskers before transferring to Rhode Island last season and then heading back to Nebraska this year.
Nebraska is a well-balanced team that ranks 25th in analyst Ken Pomeroy’s adjusted offensive efficiency rating and 28th in adjusted defensive efficiency, which would be the program’s bests during the Hoiberg era. More than 50% of the Cornhuskers’ field goal attempts are 3’s, while opponents are shooting 51.2% of their field goal attempts from beyond the 3-point arc, which ranks as the fourth most in Division 1.
Unlike at Iowa State, where Hoiberg led the Cyclones to three NCAA tournament appearances in four seasons in the early 2010s, he did not achieve overnight success at Nebraska. The Cornhuskers won seven games in each of Hoiberg’s first two seasons and then went 10-22 in the 2021-22 season. They finally finished .500 (16-16) the next season before going 23-11 and making the NCAA tournament in 2024, where they lost to Texas A&M in the first round. That was Nebraska’s first NCAA tournament appearance in a decade and second since 1998.
A year ago, Nebraska started 12-2 but lost six consecutive Big Ten games in January and five league games in a row to end the regular season. The Cornhuskers finished 7-13 in the Big Ten and in a four-way tie for 12th in the league and didn’t even make the conference tournament. But they regrouped in the Crown tournament and defeated Arizona State, Georgetown, Boise State and UCF to win the event.
This season, Nebraska has carried over that momentum and has joined No. 1 Arizona, No. 2 Michigan, No. 3 Duke, No. 4 Iowa State, No. 13 Vanderbilt and unranked Miami (Ohio) as the lone undefeated teams in D1. The Cornhuskers should remain unbeaten through the end of 2025, as their remaining games this month are against lowly North Dakota (4-9) and New Hampshire (3-7).
Nebraska’s next major test comes on Jan. 2 against Michigan State, which is 9-1 and No. 9 in the AP poll. The Cornhuskers are in a loaded Big Ten and have eight games remaining against teams (Michigan, Purdue, Michigan State, UCLA, Illinois, Iowa and Indiana) in the top 31 of KenPom’s rankings. As such, Nebraska will almost certainly face a tough stretch during the season.
Still, Hoiberg has the Cornhuskers in a place that is foreign to their fans, which Hoiberg would know considering his Midwest and Nebraska roots. Hoiberg is known as “The Mayor” at Iowa State, his alma mater where he was a star guard in the 1990s. He grew up near Iowa State’s campus and remains a legend there and the fourth-leading scorer in program history. He also has ties to Nebraska, where he was born and where his grandfather, Jerry Bush, coached the Cornhuskers for nine seasons in the 1950s and 1960s.
Bush never finished above .500 in a season, and most other coaches struggled at Nebraska, too. The Cornhuskers made the NCAA tournament for the first time in 1986. They have made it seven more times since then, including four in a row from 1991 through 1994, but they have never won a tournament game. If Hoiberg can break that streak, he would add the most unlikely and significant achievement to an already impressive career.