Miles' message: 'I'm tired of losing'

During Nebraska’s flight home following Sunday’s loss at Northwestern to close out the 2015-16 regular season, head coach Tim Miles decided he needed address some issues surrounding his program amid another disappointing year.

On Monday morning, just prior to his interview on the Big Ten coaches’ teleconference leading into this week’s conference tournament in Indianapolis, Miles sent a message to Husker fans, alumni, and his players via Twitter.

“It was something I wanted to do just to say, listen, we feel bad for our fans,” Miles expanded. “We feel bad for not being more successful. I want to have great success. I want a program that everybody is just ignited about and just fired up about… I believe we have great days ahead of us. I believe that we are building it the right way, that we have a very strong foundation. And that goes deeper than just the freshmen players. I mean, we’re healthy academically. Our guys are good guys. Knock on wood, the behavior has been excellent.

“As you go forward, you feel like all we have to worry about is how we improve the team and how we develop our players further. Now, that’s hard, but if you don’t have 10 problems to solve - sometimes you’ve got academic issues, you’ve got behavior issues, and you feel like you have to fix everything. But we don’t. We just have to get less empty minutes on the floor, and I believe that we’re going to add more players next year, and we’re not done recruiting yet. So we can still make a leap forward, and we need to. I’m tired of losing.”

Now two years removed from its magical run to the NCAA Tournament in 2013-14, Nebraska has since followed with a massively underachieving performance last season and now an almost equally frustrating campaign this year, in which the Huskers went 14-17 overall and 6-11 in Big Ten play. Even worse, the Huskers have lost nine of their past 11 games, including a current five-game losing streak.

Miles noted that the issues that plagued NU last season were much different than those facing his current team. Last year, Miles said there was “a dynamic that probably wasn’t going to change” in the locker room. This season, Miles pointed to the concussion suffered by star senior Shavon Shields as the point where things started to unravel.

Not only did NU go 1-3 in the four games Shields missed, it also struggled to adjust again when he came back for a road trip to Penn State. The Huskers have lost all three games since Shields returned. On top of that, Miles said junior guard Andrew White’s lingering shoulder injury - which was severe enough to require cortisone shots - and an illness to freshman guard Glynn Watson all hit NU at once along with Shields’ injury.

“I think it’s different circumstances, or at least it feels like different circumstances,” Miles said. “I’m always surprised when I look at our record or surprised when I hear we’ve lost nine out of 11. It just surprises me. There’s some unusual circumstances that happened this year… I just think the circumstances are different because of the injuries to two key players.”

Maybe the most frustrating aspect of this season has been that no matter what buttons Miles has tried to push - whether it be changes to the starting lineup, schematic adjustments, or altered roles for certain players - nothing has managed to stick as Nebraska’s formula for success.

With one final chance to make a postseason push in the Big Ten Tournament, which the No. 11-seed Huskers open on Wednesday night against No. 14 Rutgers, Miles knows time is running out for the potential he sees so clearly within his team to translate into results on the court.

“Winning and losing are a coach’s essence,” Miles said. “When you’re winning, you’re out there and you love everybody and want to hug grandma, grandpa, you name it, right? Then when you’re losing, you just want to crawl in a hole, because you feel responsible, and you are. It’s also personal, you know? That’s probably what’s most disappointing and frustrating for me, is to not figure out the last two seasons of how to get out of that…

“As a coach, you sit there and say, ‘OK, I need to change the stimulus. I need to make some things happen’ without panicking. Because you obviously want to be a leader of your team and you need to be the leader of your team, and so what can we do to get us out of this funk? I believe it only takes a spark to start a fire, and I believe that just a few things have to happen for us to get one the top. Obviously I haven’t pushed the right buttons, and that’s what really - I feel bad for our fans, our alumni, and especially our players.”