Fred Hoiberg describes Nebraska's unique approach to scoring wins, losses

Fred Hoiberg has taken the term “moral victories” to a whole other level with the grading system he employs at Nebraska. Coming off of back-to-back losses on the road against Purdue and Iowa, the Cornhuskers coach explained his interesting way of judging away games vs. home games.

“Our formula is, if we win at home, it’s a zero,” Hoiberg said. “If you lose on the road, it’s a zero. If you lose at home, it’s a minus-one. If you win on the road, it’s a plus-one. We’re still even right now. So it’s not time to panic.”

Nebraska currently has a 2-3 record through its first five Big Ten games. However, because all three of its losses came on the road, Hoiberg doesn’t see it as in a bad position right now compared to the rest of the conference.

Even coming off of a lopsided 104-68 loss against Purdue, he isn’t worried about how the Cornhuskers measure up. He still admits that the team hasn’t been up to par so far in conference play, but that’s more because they haven’t played up to what he knows they are capable of.

“You look at a couple of the teams that are in front of us in the standings that are also at a zero and the team that’s got the highest plus at the end of the year generally wins the league,” Hoiberg said. “I think Michigan State and Michigan are both at +3 right now. So we’ve just gotta keep grinding and trusting.

“Sometimes, there’s such an overreaction when something happens like it did the other day at Purdue. What do you do with the system? Do you start over or do you just, what you’re doing, do it better, do it longer, do it harder. So those are the things that we’re really trying to focus on right now because we’ve had a formula. Where we are, I think we’re 20th in the nation defensively, but in league games I think we’re 17th out of 18 teams. So we’ve gotta just get back to being who we are, doing it with more consistency and having longer stretches where we do it right.”

Fred Hoiberg is in his sixth season as the Nebraska coach and led the Cornhuskers to the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 2024. They also bring back many of the players that helped them get there such as Brice Williams, Juwan Gary and Rollie Worster.

That in mind, this is a veteran squad that should be able to weather the storm of a few early losses and get back on track. Their next opportunity to do so will come against Rutgers at 8 p.m. CT on Thursday.