Jacob Padilla

I went in-depth on this special stretch of play from Sam with some insight from his biggest supporter (i.e. his twin). https://hailvarsity.com/basketball/from-scout-team-to-belonging-in-the-big-ten-sam-hoiberg-is-living-the-dream/

I broke down the connection between Derrick Walker and Keisei Tominaga (with clips) for Hail Varsity. https://hailvarsity.com/basketball/padding-the-stats-nebraskas-dynamic-duo/

Not in this game, unfortunately. Somebody I was sitting next to in press row was counting his shots at halftime and said he made something like three shots the entire time he was counting (missed 20+). Couldn't even get a make to end on. He's in a tough spot right now (which is putting Nebraska in an even tougher spot considering the lack of other options).

If you'd like to relive the Penn Sate game to get ready for Michigan, I wrote an in-depth breakdown with clips of Keisei Tominaga picking apart the Nittany Lions every way possible. https://hailvarsity.com/basketball/nebrasketball-film-study-keisei-tominagas-30-point-explosion/

He's more of a mid-to-low-major recruit at this point. Still has a long way to go before he earns a high-major offer. The frame is certainly intriguing, and he's capable of being a better shooter than he's been so far this high school season. Needs a big spring and summer. Had his breakout last summer playing as the No. 1 option for NBDA, though he didn't exactly face shoe circuit competition with their schedule. Was one of several Nebraska players who earned an invitation so SDSU's elite camp and he performed well enough there to get an offer. Northern Iowa was there watching him against Skutt on Tuesday. His dad played for Greg McDermott at Wayne State back in the day, so that's where that connection is.

Hoiberg on Ramel Lloyd Jr. today: “We thought about it. We talked to him, and just the decision moving forward with that is you’ve got to do what's best for the kid. Do you pull the redshirt to get him to play 10 or 11 games, a third of the season? I just don't think that's the right thing to do. His mindset would be a complete shift of running other team’s things, which has been great for Ramel. He's learning the league every game, every day, seeing what other teams are running, being the featured player in those systems. You’ve got to shift to get into our stuff, which he obviously hasn't gotten a lot of reps with that with the decision being made to redshirt this season. So yeah, I thought thought about it, had a really good talk with him, and for right now we're going to keep him in his redshirt.”

That doesn't really matter. Does Ramel want to burn a year of eligibility to play 12 games? Redshirting is a player's decision, not a coach's.

This is where it helps for the officials to explain calls after reviews. If we're going to take the time to stop the game, help the TV production educate the viewers. At no point did the broadcast focus on where the ball hit on the initial shot, just whether or not Sam got his feet in bounds. Initially I think it was hard to tell whether it hit the bottom of the backboard or the support, and the call on the floor that they reviewed was definitely Sam being out of bounds. After the lengthy review and the TV focusing on sideline (and Shon Morris' input about the closed fist thing), the officials simply signaled Nebraska ball and they played on. In the NBA, officials explain their conclusion after reviews, which I think helps the fans. The funny thing is that Sam was officially credited with a block, but it looks like it slipped out of Key's hands on the way up and if anything, Sam whacked his empty hands. If he had blocked it on the way up, and they did determine it was but because it hit the support, it would have been off Sam. But I don't think he ever touched the ball. As for the officials themselves, it's funny how every fan seems to think their conference has the worst officials. It's almost like it's a really difficult job. There are so many calls on a game-to-game basis that I just don't understand, but we typically have a better view and aren't focusing on as many things at once as officials need to. Take the Keisei foul for instance: horrible, horrible call. What I think happened was the official was still trying to get in place and was turning around as Sensabaugh made the terrible pass to McNeil that took him off balance from the start. Keisei closed the distance and McNeil, after trying to hold his place, finally started to fall forward and then traveled before jumping to try to get rid of the ball. I think it was a case of the official seeing the forward movement from Keisei followed by the movement from McNeil, and assumed one caused the other. You certainly don't want officials judging reactions rather than actions, but in the moment of a bang-bang play with the official possibly getting eyes on the play late, it's harder to determine what really happened. This is the problem with the flopping technical rule — sometimes it's really difficult in the moment to see what actually happened. To the game as a whole, I thought they were fairly consistent for a large stretch of the game in that they just refused to call anything despite a significant amount of contact on both ends of the floor. Guys were beating each other up. The sequence where Sam got killed without a call then the officials whistled the moving screen on Breidenbach the next play (which led to the Fred technical) was a departure from the general consistency up until that point, and the calls started to pile up on one side.

Don't think this is nearly as black and white as you're laying it out here, though I do agree coaches are often too far to the conservative end of the spectrum. To last night's game in particular, Nebraska was hanging around until the last three minutes, and it's not like Walker was doing much when he was on the court anyway. I think Hoiberg was trying to get to halftime and give Walker a chance to reset and then play freely in the second half without potentially picking up a third in the first half. Then the wheels fell off late. Like Matt mentioned, there were 24 fouls called in the first half, so the risk factor for third foul for either Walker or Bandoumel, especially considering who they'd likely be guarding, was pretty high. Part of it depends on the coach's trust in the player and understanding of the player's ability to play smart and avoid fouls. You'd rather have one of your best players on the court than not, but when a guy plays in foul trouble it can often make him less aggressive and a liability on defense as teams target him knowing he doesn't want to pick up another, and if he does that's also a win. It's not entirely about making sure the guy is available at the end in case of a close game (though that's certainly part of it).

Nah, paid attendance was 12,756. Plenty of gaps in the crowd.

They looked like a team who had scouted Nebraska's defense and were incredibly well prepared to attack it, and they did a great job of executing their game plan. They moved the ball well with Nebraska in rotation and attacked aggressive closeouts for on-balance one-dribble pull-ups (which I noted on Twitter during the game as well). I counted 9-14 on mid-range 2-point jumpers in the first half alone during my re-watch, and I believe they went 4-4 on floaters in the game as a whole. Meanwhile, Nebraska couldn't hit wide open shots on the other end.

There's nobody who is close to getting an offer at this point, but Loenser was in Omaha on Friday for the quarterfinals of the Metro Holiday Tournament. Jaden Jackson (Bellevue West), Bryson Bahl (Papillion-La Vista South), Derek Rollins and Neal Mosser (Millard North) and A'mare Bynum are some of the 2024 and 2025 guys he got a look at. Again, there's nobody that is a sure offer, but Loenser continues to due his due diligence locally as he has since they started phasing Abdelmassih out and putting more responsibility on his plate.

Playing around with Bart Torvik backs up the eye test of Nebraska being a completely different team without and with Walker. In the eight games he's been back, they've been close to a top-50 defense, up about 70 spots from where they were without him. They've been about 40 spots better on offense, but that still only gets them to 153rd. They've got to find a way to score the ball a little better if they want to have success in the Big Ten, and I think the most likely path to that is improved consistency and effectiveness from the 3-point line for Bandoumel (24.6%) and Wilcher (32.8%). Both have shown they're capable of shooting much better than that, and Nebraska really needs them to because they don't have a lot of other avenues to offensive improvement based on the personnel.

It was Jessica Coody from the Huskers Radio Network. She's done the play-by-play for all the B1G+ games with Strickland.

That's the gamble you take if you choose to redshirt (or previously transferred as a non-grad transfer). The standard NCAA timeline is athletes get five years to complete four seasons of eligibility. You can choose to redshirt a year OR you can claim a medical hardship, but not both, because that pushes you into the six years to play four territory instead, and that's where you have to make a strong case to the NCAA in order to receive that sixth year.

Gibbs got the sixth year by showing he wasn't healthy enough to play during that redshirt year at Creighton. Missing two seasons with injury is the easiest path to getting a sixth year. Taking a voluntary redshirt (which is what McPherson did) and then needing a medical hardship for a different season is where it gets more complicated I think, and I haven't gotten a great answer on that (I still have no idea how Kayla Caffey got another year because she chose to take a redshirt her first year and then also missed her third year with an injury at Mizzou; it said on her Mizzou bio that she was awarded a medical redshirt by the NCAA, but I was under the impression you had to apply for that at the end of your career, so I have no clue).

Forgot to share this, and I don't want to start up a new thread just for a link, so I'll put this here. Tominaga had a rough day against Kansas State (as did almost everyone else) but what he's done so far this year has been quite impressive. I broke down how he was shooting 50-43-100 heading itno Saturday's game. https://hailvarsity.com/basketball/nebrasketball-film-study-keisei-tominaga-second-season-leap/

Baylor: 12.5 PPG, .556 TS%, 9.6 RPG, 2.5 APG, 1.4 TPG, 1.0 SPG, 31.2 MPG Sam: 10.7 PPG, .523 TS%, 5.8 RPG, 4.8 APG, 2.6 TPG, 1.4 SPG, 32.8 MPG I think both guys have been feeling things out and adjusting to their roles, teammates and level of competition. Like Navin said, Baylor upped his aggressiveness in the second half against Arizona State with the other perimeter players struggling. Fans aren't ever happy with anybody during a losing streak, but Baylor's been the least of their problems and I think he's going to settle in just fine and we'll see a bit more out of him. Both guys have shown they can absolutely be a difference-maker at the high-major level. Both are looking for consistency, but that's to be expected with the leap in competition. I think both guys are happy with their decisions and will get better moving forward.

It was an offensive foul. They called a push-off on Smith.

Sorry, that should be 5-6 for the second figure; fat fingers. The Nembhard block was the only miss.

What Walker did on Sunday was incredibly impressive. Kalkbrenner was a step slow, slightly out of position, a tad too late to react on shots, and Walker made him pay. Breaking down Walker's shot attempts, I classified 10 of them as essentially one-on-one with Kalkbrenner. Kalkbrenner stopped him four times, Walker scored on the other six. His other six attempts were on other players or in situations where others created a finishing opportunity for him (he shot 4-6).

After watching the game back, I think it's the former more than the latter. There were adjustments to be had they just chose not to make. Certainly seemed like they went in thinking they could just get by without exerting too much effort and just never flipped that switch when it became clear that wasn't the case.

No offense to Quientan, but Mike was a much, much better player and shooter in high school. He put up some monster numbers at Kimball and he landed his SDSU offer by hitting like 10 3s in an AAU game or something like that where coaches were there watching someone else. Gary Parrish at CBS has written/told the story before. The redshirt year was a rough one for him, and the coaches initially thought they made a mistake, but the talent was there and he fought through to become a terrific college basketball player almost as soon as he set foot on the floor as a redshirt freshman.

His name is Quientan McCafferty. He's not that kind of shooter (few are). Very raw but he's improved a great deal over the past year.

Not really sure where to put this, so I'll go with here. I broke down all of Derrick Walker's buckets and assists from his two games in Orlando to show what his return to the lineup mans for the Huskers. https://hailvarsity.com/basketball/nebrasketball-film-study-derrick-walker-is-back/