Huskers left with many questions following inexplicable loss
The night before Nebraska took on Samford, Tim Miles was in Omaha cheering on the Huskers’ women’s volleyball team in their sweep Texas en route to winning the 2015 national championship.
As he watched John Cook’s team do all the little things right and make all the winning plays necessary to reach the pinnacle of their sport, Miles couldn’t help but hope that someday his squad could emulate that type of all-around complete performance.
Little did he know that less than 24 hours later NU would turn in one of its sloppiest games of the season in a 69-58 upset by the Bulldogs of the Southern Conference.
The Huskers committed 17 turnovers, shot 6-of-22 from 3-point range and finished a season-low 50 percent (10-of-20) from the free throw line to suffer their second loss to a low-major opponent in as many years. Having just watched one Nebraska program perform so well at the highest level, the effort was even more frustrating than Miles could have imagined.
“All the little things, their positioning was perfect, everything was right,” Miles said of the NU volleyball team. “As soon as something wasn’t right, it never happened again. That’s how you win. You’re just an every-day, every-play guy; every-day, every-play girl, and that’s what winning looks like. It’s not beautiful… Just doing it over and over until somebody makes a mistake. But until you eliminate losing, you’re not going to be a winner.”
The turnovers were one of the most glaring issues in the loss, but they were far from the lone culprit. Senior Shavon Shields and junior Andrew White combined to score 42 of Nebraska’s 58 points, and they didn’t get much of any help from their teammates the entire night.
Samford used a full-court press all game long, which Miles said actually got even more difficult for his team after they made some adjustments at halftime to try and handle it better. When Nebraska did get the ball past half court, the offense was often stagnant and relied on Shields or White to make plays one-on-one.
In particular, Miles said NU’s inability to get touches in the high post - a staple in his motion offense - forced players to try and do too much much off the dribble, which in turn led to four charging fouls.
“That’s just selfish basketball, and I just don’t know if I had them in the mode to ‘self-correct’ enough,” Miles said. “I thought the warmth of competition would get us there. We talked about things. We addressed errors. To have 17 errors … Nobody stepped up to help Andrew and Shavon. I mean, we go 4-20 with 12 turnovers from the rest of the guys, and that won’t cut it against anybody.”
Miles’ blunt criticism of Nebraska’s play didn’t end there, either.
“I think they just didn’t want to do it,” Miles said when asked about not getting the ball in the high post. “They didn’t want to make the extra effort to get it in and set ourselves up. That’s why I was really disappointed. I said, ‘Guys, either we don’t know or we don’t care. That’s a pretty harsh reality. Either you don’t know or you don’t care.
“We know we start the offense like this, so why don’t we just do the little things? Because we don’t care. ‘Ah, it’s no big deal.’ We don’t care enough to do it. Well, that’s not winning basketball. Until you care enough to do those little things - and it may feel like it’s unimportant or whatever - but you can see, we don’t get the touches the we know that we’re going to have to have in the right spot.”
After the game, Miles made a coach’s decision to have only Shields represent the team in the post-game press conference. Like Miles, Shields had trouble pinpointing any specific answers for how the Huskers could come out so flat a week after picking up one of their biggest wins of the season against Rhode Island.
“Mindsets,” Shields said. “Everybody being locked in and ready to go. I think that is what it boils down to. The coaches gave us everything we needed in order to win, and we just didn’t go out and execute anything… I felt like especially when they were staying with us in the first half, once shots weren’t falling I think people started getting down on themselves and hesitating, things like that. You can’t have that happen. When you do things like that you end up losing games.”
There were many reasons for Nebraska’s latest disappointing loss, and with just one remaining game on the non-conference slate left before the start of Big Ten play, it’s clear the Huskers aren’t much closer to finding their formula for success as they were at the beginning of the season.
“I wondered to myself if we were above this or not. I really did,” Miles said. “I was hoping, right? I’m like, I think maybe with Andrew and Shavon and Benny (Parker) and these guys, maybe we’re above that? That’s what I get for thinking.”