Yeah, I know I’ve got a warped sense of humor. One of my favorite ways to attempt to drop the mic is to dismiss the performance of someone that purports to be significantly great as being like the admiral of the Nebraska navy. Sometimes I take for granted that not everyone seems to know that Nebraska is completely landlocked, nor is it an independent country–or even aspiring to be one. The fact that I have to explain this snark frequently exasperates and exhausts me.
Then again, Nebraska’s not exactly top of mind with most of the folks in my orbit, especially football fans. It’s been a generation since their eponymous university was the epicenter of college football, regularly winning titles in the now-defunct Big Eight and a couple of national championships in the process. And with all due respect to their outsized ability to draw massive crowds in college volleyball, despite the best efforts of ESPN to the contrary it’s still not a mainstream sport outside of Lincoln and–ironically–locations that actually do have a coastline.
But now that college football has whittled down to one single game (among actual schools at least) and more attention is being paid to basketball one can’t help but get bug-eyed at the fact that just three undefeated men’s teams remain in all of Division I. Two of the anmes are unsurprising–the Arizona Wildcats are #1, which is anything but atypical. There’s also Miami, although it’s the Ohio and not the Florida version in this case. An accomplishment to be sure, but after barely surviving in overtime yesterday against SUNY Buffalo, FFS, I for one think the Redhawks’ streak is just about done.
I’m far more bullish on the Cornhuskers, and with every game that they continue to knock off foes in the overstuffed Big Ten I grow all the more so. Yesterday afternoon was yet another reinforcement of that viewpoint, as the AInoymous at FIELD LEVEL MEDIA reported:
Braden Frager and Pryce Sandfort each scored in the 20s for the second consecutive game and No. 8 Nebraska extended the nation’s longest active win streak with a 77-58 victory at Northwestern on Saturday afternoon in a Big Ten Conference game in Evanston, Ill.
Sandfort had 22 points on 7-of-13 shooting including 5 of 10 from 3-point range, while Frager had 20 on 8-of-14 shooting. They combined for 51 points in Tuesday’s blowout win over Oregon. Nebraska won a fourth straight conference road game for the first time since 1975-76.