‘The Mayor’ and his son turned around Nebraska’s basketball program. Now they have one box to tick: A NCAA Tournament win
By Dana O’Neil, CNN
(CNN) — Sam Hoiberg sat at the far end of the Nebraska bench and watched one dismal loss beget the next.
Between December 1, 2021, and February 5, 2022, the Cornhuskers lost 15 of 16, only claiming victory against lowly Kennesaw State. The Huskers took a brief pause from their doldrums to summon up a home win against Minnesota only to revert back to losing, dropping four more in a row.
Sam at the time was a redshirting walk-on, which on the basketball-player hierarchy is maybe a half-step up from team manager. The very definition of helpless, he sat and watched the very bad product unspooling in front of him night after night, feeling the pain of the poor saps who had to pay to watch.
“I didn’t blame them if they didn’t show up,” Sam told CNN Sports. “It was hard to watch sitting on the bench.”
Harder still because Sam had legit skin in the game. Way down at the opposite end of his spot on the bench sat Sam’s dad, Fred. He was the captain of this particular sinking ship, in his third year as Nebraska’s head coach. The first two – through the Covid-19 pandemic and post-Covid chaos – earned Fred a mulligan but as the days in the 2021-22 season dwindled, his red chair was as metaphorically hot as it was literally scarlet.
It all felt uncomfortably familiar to Sam. Before Nebraska, Fred served as head coach of the Chicago Bulls, a three-year tenure that ended with ESPN labeling him the worst coach in the NBA, and middle-aged men sliding into the messages of the shared Instagram account of middle-school Sam and his twin brother, Jack, to tell them their dad ought to be fired. Sam was not really interested in a repeat.
From his position miles removed from playing, there wasn’t much Sam could do to influence the 40 minutes of actual basketball. That didn’t mean, he reasoned, that he couldn’t turn Nebraska basketball on its ear.
“We had to change the culture, and I thought I could be a part of that process,” Sam said. “I wasn’t even thinking about playing. I thought I could be helpful by hosting recruits, making sure we found guys who were about winning and talking about the players we should and shouldn’t recruit.”
In the very homespun, letterman-sweater kind of town that is Lincoln, Nebraska’s basketball resurrection has been appropriately engineered by Hoiberg & Son.
This week Sam, the one-time redshirting walk-on, was named an honorable mention selection to the All-Big Ten team (and many people think he got snubbed) and Fred, on the hot seat five years ago, is the Big Ten Coach of the Year (and he just got a contract extension). Together, they will lead Nebraska into Chicago for the Big Ten Tournament as the No. 2 seed, courtesy of a record 15 league wins, after opening the season on a 20-game unbeaten tear and finishing the regular season as the No. 11 team in the nation.
Now, in a season of ticking off accomplishments, the Cornhuskers bull their way into March taking dead-eye aim at the elephant sitting square in the middle of their locker room: Their school is the only power conference team that has failed to win a NCAA Tournament game.
The Cornhuskers would like to change that.
“(If we didn’t win), it wouldn’t negate everything we did,” Sam says. “But it definitely wouldn’t be as satisfying as it could have been.”
A football school with a basketball problem
The easy comparison, of course, is to Indiana football – seasons of discontent suddenly disappearing into a blissful and unexpected eruption of success, the oft-ignored stepchild of the athletic department finally stepping into the spotlight.
To be fair, Nebraska hasn’t been as allergic to winning as IU football. Indiana, remember, was the losingest football program in FBS history until last year’s magical undefeated run; Nebraska just can’t win in March. But you do have to scour the record books to find bright spots.
Way back in 1920, the Cornhuskers put together their first 20-win season, barnstorming across the country to outscore opponents 792-406, according to the Scottsbluff Star Herald – this despite one newspaper report worrying about their “average weight of 144 pounds.” They didn’t reach the high-water mark again until 1966. The first tourney bid arrived in 1986, but after the Huskers lost to Western Kentucky, head coach Moe Iba (son of the legendary Henry) immediately handed his letter of resignation to a school official.
Danny Nee followed Iba and led Nebraska to four consecutive NCAA bids from 1991 through 1994, and another in 1998 but two years later was fired on the heels of an 11-19 season. Barry Collier gave it a go in Lincoln, hoping he could bring the same wiles he used to engineer success at Butler to Nebraska. Six years and no NCAA bids later, he returned to Butler as the school’s AD. Longtime assistant and UTEP head coach Doc Sadler failed to crack the tourney riddle in his six seasons, and the hyped-up Tim Miles petered out after seven years and one NCAA bid.
Then along came Hoiberg.
But unlike Hoosier fans, who historically only filled Memorial Stadium for spring commencement ceremonies, Nebraska fans have remained hopelessly devoted to their chronically underperforming team. Defying all odds – and maybe a little logic – since the Pinnacle Bank Arena opened in 2013, the Huskers have ranked in the top 25 nationally in attendance for 11 consecutive seasons.
A local TV segment recently profiled 93-year-old Mary Ann Wenninghoff, a basketball season ticketholder since 1976. She explained how she started to go with her husband, Ron, and remained loyal after his passing seven years ago. While Mary Ann waxed eloquent about her faithfulness to the Cornhuskers, her son, Joel, came clean.
“We always questioned her a bit all these years, coming and watching the teams that didn’t do so good,” he told 10/11 News.
‘The Mayor’ comes to Lincoln
Nebraska has not, needless to say, been a destination job. But of all people, the Hoibergs get it.
Fred may be known as “The Mayor” across state lines in Ames, Iowa (where he played high school ball, starred, and later coached at Iowa State) but he was actually born in Lincoln.
His parents, Eric and Karen, are Nebraska graduates and his grandfather, Jerry Bush, served as the Cornhuskers head basketball coach in the mid ‘50s and early ‘60s (he went 81-132). Heck, before he went to Iowa State, legendary Nebraska football coach Tom Osborne offered Hoiberg a scholarship to play quarterback for the Huskers.
“Nebraska is a very unique place; people show up no matter what,” Fred told CNN Sports. “I knew that, and I believed and felt that I was the right person for the job.”
Though he was coming off the crash-and-burn tenure with the Bulls, it was hard to argue the hire. At Iowa State, Fred led a Cyclones revolution. He took Iowa State to the NCAA Tournament in four of his five seasons, including the Sweet 16 in 2014, building the Cyclone roster on transfer players long before it came into vogue.
Nebraska needed a similar zhuzhing when he came to town. Then-athletic director Bill Moos pledged his financial commitment to Cornhusker basketball, giving Hoiberg a $3.5 million per year deal that made him the third-highest paid coach in the Big Ten (behind Tom Izzo at Michigan State and John Beilein at Michigan) and pledging $1 million to his assistant coaching pool.
In turn, Fred thought – in hindsight naively – he could work the same magic in Lincoln as he did in Ames. Instead, the Cornhuskers won a combined nine Big Ten games in their first three seasons and – by the time Sam came on board in 2021 – “The Mayor” was not necessarily going to be asked to run for a second term.
Fred agreed at the end of the season to restructure that big contract, taking a $250,000 pay cut, giving up a $500,000 bonus and dropping his buyout by $4 million.
More critically, he leaned on his son.
The Mayor’s son becomes the glue guy
It is a tricky tightrope coaching your kid; it can be even trickier to be the kid being coached by your dad. As a redshirt walk-on, it wasn’t like Sam was stealing anyone’s playing time. Still, both were cognizant that Fred would treat Sam as a player and only a player between the lines and not blur the lines between parenting and coaching. It helped that Sam is a grinder, the prototypical gym rat whose hard work always overcame whatever physical deficiencies he might have.
Despite the delicate balance, there is also an inherent – even genetic – understanding. Sam intuited what his father sought in a player, and what mattered to him as he tried to establish Nebraska’s culture. Without being asked, Sam inserted himself into the recruiting process. Not just hosting would-be Cornhuskers but sharing his feedback as well.
“I didn’t hold back,” he says now.
In Fred’s early years, Nebraska didn’t necessarily have bad guys; they just weren’t the kind of guys he personally could win with. They were more solitary, focused internally rather than working for the greater good. No one hung out together or really spoke much outside the confines of basketball. This, remember, is a man they called “The Mayor.” Fred is preternaturally destined to be a good, welcoming human.
As the roster turned over after that nadir of a season, Sam made sure guys hung out. He invited everyone to his apartment – to watch ball, to play video games, to just be.
“He was instrumental,” his father said. “You have to build that team chemistry, but it can’t just be me telling them to go hang out. They have to want to do it. When you have a genuine care factor, when you can hold each other accountable, that’s when it works. Sam helped make that happen.”
It wasn’t overnight; things built to last rarely are. But after simmering for two seasons, the chemistry finally started to boil.
By 2023-24, Nebraska put together its first 20-win season since 2018 and then proceeded to back it up with another one, a feat that hadn’t been accomplished since Nee’s days. They extended their season with an invite to the Crown, a postseason Fox event that inspired eyerolls from plenty of people but served Nebraska perfectly.
It allowed the Cornhuskers to right a lousy finish – they lost their last five – and entirely rewrite their own narrative by winning four in a row to capture the Crown.
Figuring it out
This year, the good vibes finally bubbled over.
Fred thought he might have something special in the preseason, not just because of the team chemistry but because the ball went in the basket. He felt certain of it in early December.
In the span of six days, the Cornhuskers beat rival Creighton at home and stomped Wisconsin and then went to Illinois for their first Big Ten road game. They fought off a fierce Illini rally and Jamarques Lawrence hit a last-second three to seal the victory. It was a complete turnaround from a year earlier when Nebraska upset No. 1 Purdue at home only to go on the road get entirely punked by Iowa.
“That string of games this year, that’s really where the belief set in, the idea that, ‘Hey we have a chance to do something,’” Fred said. “Even when you have a good group, you still don’t know how they’ll handle the emotions of the season. After that, I kind of knew this team was going to find a way.”
A deeper dive into the roster makeup shows exactly why it worked. Fred remains committed to the portal – three, or maybe more like two-and-a-half, guys are transfers. But they are not hotshot NIL mercenaries.
Pryce Sandfort played sparingly at Iowa before transferring to Nebraska and Berke Büyüktuncel averaged just 4.5 points at UCLA. The half-guy comes via Lawrence, the rare boomerang transfer, who started at Nebraska, left for Rhode Island and came back to Lincoln.
The other two are homegrown. Braden Frager grew up sitting in the rafters watching the Cornhuskers, dreaming that one day he’d play D1 hoops. Coaches didn’t agree with his assessment until late in his high school career. When Nebraska came calling, Frager fast-tracked his graduation to reclassify and then arrived only to find out that Hoiberg was leaning toward a redshirt season.
“Obviously, I didn’t want to do it,” he said. “Nobody wants to sit for a year and when I went to talk to the coaches, I was a little bummed out. I figured I’d see how it goes and then halfway through, I realized, ‘OK, it’s over.’ It helped me just put my head down and grind.”
The result is a swaggy sharpshooter who, to those who weren’t in the gym for a year watching scout team, came out of nowhere. Though not nearly as far from the depths as Sam. The redshirt walk-on has not only started all 31 games this year, he averages 32 minutes per game and ranks third in the nation in assist-to-turnover ratio. He has become the personification of not only this team, but what Nebraska basketball wants to be about – blue collar, determined, feisty and only about winning.
Sam remembers that redshirt year, working out with one of the student managers.
“I remember telling him that I had all these goals in my head, but if I said them out loud, people would laugh at me,” he said. “I mean, if you had told me then I would be honorable mention All-Big Ten, I would have passed out. It was really only in my wildest dreams that this could happen.”
The last hurdle
Western Kentucky (eight seed over nine); Xavier (14 seed over three); UConn (nine seed over an eight); New Mexico State (seven seed over 10); Penn (11 seed over six); Arkansas (six seed over 11); Baylor (nine seed over eight); Texas A&M (nine seed over eight).
That’s Nebraska’s list of NCAA futility. Not lengthy. Not a lot of games that, by seed at least, the Huskers would have been expected to win.
Still, once Northwestern beat Vanderbilt in 2017, Nebraska remained the last school standing in the Power 5 NCAA victory draft. These Cornhuskers are treating the elephant much like Virginia considered righting its first-round loss to UMBC in 2019. They aren’t not talking about it; they just don’t need to talk about it.
“I mean,” Fred says, “everybody knows.”
The coach is approaching it as coaches do; very practically. He’s counting on his players to bring the same aplomb to the postseason as they have since November. Not make one game bigger than the rest. Don’t reinvent the wheel. Do what you’ve been doing and so forth.
His players don’t necessarily disagree. They appreciate and respect the matter-of-fact approach. But when you start your career sitting on a bench watching losses pile on top of one another only to engineer a turnaround so complete that all of that feels like a distant memory, you want the bow on top of the present.
“No matter what, the legacy we all leave behind is something we can be incredibly proud of,” Sam said. “But this would be the perfect way to cap it off.”
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