Nebraska Basketball’s 11-0 Start Is the Feel-Good Story of the Season

If you don’t feel that 11-0 Nebraska is the feel-good story of the college basketball season so far, consider Kent Pavelka.

He’s the Cornhuskers’ radio announcer of more than 40 years. Meaning he’s sat through a litany of pretty forgettable seasons of basketball. 

And Pavelka sounded like he was having a heart attack when he called Jamarques Lawrence’s dramatic 3-pointer at the buzzer for Nebraska to stun then-No. 13 Illinois over the weekend.

“I’m gonna pass out!” Pavelka is able to sputter as Lawrence’s teammates mob him on the court.

If you’re just catching up, the Cornhuskers’ season just went from promising to attention-grabbing. They beat rival Creighton by 21, opened Big Ten play with a 30-point thrashing of Wisconsin, then took down Illinois on the road on Lawrence’s heroic shot.

The Huskers leapt up to No. 15 in the AP poll this week, and they face North Dakota on Dec. 21 and New Hampshire on Dec. 30 to tide them over to January -- meaning they could be 13-0 when Tom Izzo brings Michigan State to Lincoln on Jan. 2.

This is a program with some of the meekest history in college hoops, the only Power 5 team to have never won an NCAA Tournament game. This is the Charlotte Hornets starting a season on a 20-game winning streak. It’s ultimate Cinderella fodder.

It’s potentially going to wind up as Fred Hoiberg’s best coaching job.

Hoiberg made magic happen at the similarly scant Midwest outpost of Iowa State from 2010-15, then was hired by the Chicago Bulls. One playoff trip and 40 more losses than wins through 3 1/3 seasons wasn’t enough and the Bulls let him go (hate to say it, but Billy Donovan hasn’t delivered much more ever since).

People forget that just a few years ago, Nebraska could have chosen to fire Hoiberg. The athletic director had to do the “vote of confidence” thing toward the end of Year 3, releasing a statement that Hoiberg would be retained with a reduced salary even though his record stood at 24-67 by the end of that season.

It looks like the right move in hindsight.

Nebraska went 16-16 the next year, then made the 2024 NCAA Tournament to end the school’s 10-year drought. The team missed out in 2025, only to run the table at the first-ever College Basketball Crown, meaning Nebraska has the longest winning streak in the nation at 15 games.

Hoiberg’s Huskers are a remarkable 55-25 since the start of the 2023-24 season. He’s attracted talent from around the world like Japanese dynamo Keisei Tominaga (I miss watching him play) and now Rienk Mast from the Netherlands, of all places. Mast had a triple-double earlier this season and powers the offense with 17.9 points per game on 53.7% shooting.

Now they’re proving and re-proving their penchant for showing up in big moments, from the College Basketball Crown to the Hall of Fame Classic last month in K.C. to pressure-packed road environments in their league.

“It was a great win for our program, to come into one of the best environments in the league (Illinois), one of the best crowds that we are going to face in the country,” Hoiberg said in his postgame TV interview. “The way we’re handling adversity right now, we did it a couple times in our tournament in Kansas City and then found a way to just get a huge road win.”

No matter how little Nebrasketball has accomplished before this, I’d bet no team wants to see these guys stepping out from the corn in March.