Nebraska basketball teams saw breakthroughs in 2023-24

The horn blared through FedExForum in Memphis, serving as the end to Nebraska’s season. Keisei Tominaga and Josiah Allick were in tears, having played the final games of their careers. They and the rest of the Huskers shuffled off the floor, the memories of one of the best NU basketball seasons in recent memory behind them.

In the locker room, forward Juwan Gary reflected on the previous five months. The upset of then-No. 1 Purdue. The stunning comeback to down Wisconsin and prompt the second Pinnacle Bank Arena courtstorming of the year. NU qualified for the NCAA Tournament for the first time in a decade. It ended with the disappointment that Nebraska couldn’t tie a bow on it all with the first March Madness win in program history.

The next day, he was back in the gym.

“That’s actually a fuel for myself,” Gary said this summer. “Kind of know what we are capable of as a Nebraska basketball team, but at the same time, I know my team is also fueled, too, because they know we could play with everybody in this country. We could compete with anybody in this country. Whether win or lose, we could actually compete with anybody. So we know what it takes.”

That was Nebraska’s two basketball seasons. The men’s and women’s teams both made the postseason. Both made tangible progress from a year earlier and sat on top of the world at times before their seasons ended in the first weekends of the NCAA Tournament.

The banner years on the hardwood were among the highlights of a Nebraska athletics season with its fair share of twists and turns.

* The football team found an identity in Year 1 of the Matt Rhule era but didn’t have the offensive firepower to end its bowl drought.

* More than 92,000 fans showed up at Memorial Stadium on a record-breaking Volleyball Day in Nebraska. They watched a team in the early stages of a season that ended with a Big Ten title and a spot in the national championship game.

* Husker baseball won the Big Ten Tournament for the first time in program history and made its way back to a NCAA regional for the first time since 2021.

* Nebraska softball fell just short of a NCAA regional after injuries — including a season-ending injury to All-American Jordy Bahl.

* In March, as the two memorable basketball seasons were reaching their culminations, Trev Alberts abruptly resigned as Nebraska’s athletic director to take the same job at Texas A&M. A week after Alberts’ departure, Troy Dannen became the 17th AD in Nebraska history.

In the same jam-packed month, Nebraska women’s basketball made the Big Ten championship game and the Round of 32 at the NCAA Tournament, both for the first time under Amy Williams. In February, the Huskers derailed the Caitlin Clark traveling circus as they upset Iowa in front of a rollicking sellout PBA crowd that spilled onto the floor in celebration after the buzzer.

The first time Jaz Shelley stepped into the arena was for her official visit as a high schooler. Williams told the guard the women’s basketball program had never sold out the building. The implication? That Shelley could be part of something different, part of a group that did something unprecedented in Lincoln.

While a full-circle moment played out that Sunday afternoon, it was a previous matchup with Iowa that convinced Williams her team was ready to take a step forward. Less than a month earlier, the Hawkeyes left Nebraska in the dust behind a bevy of Clark 3-pointers in a 92-73 win.

But within the wreckage, Williams saw a team that considered itself on par with Iowa. In the locker room postgame, Nebraska exuded a confidence that would pay off later that season.

“I knew that our team believed that we could beat that team and therefore really anybody else that we were probably going to be facing,” Williams said. “That’s where I really started to have a strong belief in that team.”

NU went 10-5 over the last two months of the season, playing its way to a No. 6 seed in the NCAA tournament and picking up a win in the Big Dance for the first time since 2014.

“Any time that you continue to elevate, then that feeling moves higher, and that’s a positive thing,” Williams said.

The men’s team endured its own peaks and valleys as it trekked toward the postseason. It set itself up for a push toward March with a strong nonconference performance, then picked up a signature win when it topped Purdue on a night everything came together. Rienk Mast took it to Wooden Award winner Zach Edey. Tominaga made 3-pointers and fed off of a deafening home crowd. He and Gary waved on the fans that stormed the court, engulfing the team in a cathartic sea of humanity.

“Everybody that stepped on the floor, I thought, made a positive contribution tonight,” coach Fred Hoiberg said at the time. “And those are the fun ones, when you have everybody that plays contribute to the win. I’m happy for our guys. I talked to them going into this game about being part of teams that have knocked off the No. 1 team in the country. I had a couple as a player and had a couple as a coach at my previous stop, and there’s nothing like it.”

Keeping NU on the bubble for much of conference play was the Huskers’ inability to win away from home. They collapsed against Minnesota and Rutgers and sleepwalked through games at Iowa and Maryland. The Huskers didn’t win a conference road game until Feb. 21 at Indiana.

They stayed afloat behind a sterling 10-0 record at home and as the season progressed, the sheer number of options and players who could carry Nebraska for games at a time became clear. Mast connected on six 3-pointers in a 34-point double-double against Ohio State. In the win over Wisconsin, C.J. Wilcher spurred the comeback when he caught fire from deep in the second half.

Gary, Tominaga, Allick, Brice Williams and Jamarques Lawrence all had their games and moments as well, picking up the slack at various times when other players weren’t making shots or the Huskers needed a jolt.

Nebraska won six of its last seven regular season games to comfortably land within the field of 68. In Memphis, it ran into a buzzsaw of a team in Texas A&M. The Aggies were stronger and more physical under the basket. The Huskers couldn’t stay in front of them on the perimeter. TAMU even outplayed Nebraska from beyond the arc, splashing 13 3-pointers in the 98-83 beatdown.

It was an unceremonious ending to a season that moved the needle for NU basketball. The Huskers have had isolated moments of success over the past 20 years. As the Huskers walked off the court defeated, the goal turned into preventing 2023-24 from being one of those. It has to be something to build off of, a launching pad toward future tournament success.

“It’s there. There’s no reason this team can’t have sustained success,” Hoiberg said postgame. “This can’t be another decade before Nebraska gets back in the NCAA tournament. We need to be there again next year. This is the fun time of year. It’s really the only fun time of year, and now that we’ve experienced it, the guys that will be back, I think, hopefully will handle it the right way.

“It’s something where we can look back on this, hopefully, when we do get over the hump and say that these last two years have really helped us build the program the way that it needs to be built.”