Fred Hoiberg: Win vs. No. 1 Purdue ‘shows what we’re capable of’

After falling to Wisconsin in an 88-72 road loss on Saturday, Nebraska bounced back in a major way, defeating top ranked Purdue in an upset win featuring an identical 88-72 score.

Fans stormed the court at Pinnacle Bank Arena as the Cornhuskers secured a win over a No. 1 ranked opponent for the first time since 1982. The win marks Nebraska’s 13th of the season in their impressive start to year five under head coach Fred Hoiberg, who opened up about the impact of the win following the game.

“Listen, this is a special win and again the thing I’m really happy with is it shows what we’re capable of,” Hoiberg said.

“To come out there, especially after a tough loss, I mean Wisconsin handed it to us the other day. And our guys, what I told them in the locker room is we won it on Sunday when we got back in the gym and we learned from the mistakes that we made. And that’s the thing that you love as a coach is when your guys respond like they did today for the entire game for 40 minutes and execute what you preach to them.”

The Cornhuskers had a lights-out shooting performance versus the Boilermakers, making an impressive 60.9% of their three-point attempts with 14 makes from behind the arc and four players scoring in double figures. But Hoiberg knows that now is not the time to celebrate just five games into their conference schedule.

“But yeah did I enjoy it? Hell yeah I did, and I’m going to enjoy it but I’m gonna go home and I gotta start watching Iowa now,” Hoiberg said. “Like I said, I wish we had five days in between this one so I could really enjoy it tonight, but we got a game coming up. We gotta get a plan put together and we gotta get our guys ready starting tomorrow.”

After two straight seven-win seasons at the start of his head coaching tenure with Nebraska, Hoiberg has slowly but surely improved the program on a yearly basis. The Cornhuskers followed their 10-win 2021 season with 16 wins last year, and with the team already boasting a 13-3 record with 15 games remaining in the regular season, things are surely looking up in Lincoln.

“Again, it’s a great win, it’s a huge win for our program, but we have a lot of work left to do. I think that’s the way we all need to look at this thing, this can’t be the highlight of our year. I mean we gotta build off this one,” Hoiberg said.

“We bounced back from a tough loss, now we’re gonna see how we handle a big, emotional win like this and we’ll know tomorrow. We’ll know tomorrow in the gym, we won’t go long, we probably won’t do a lot of live reps, but we gotta get the game plan in and have a really good mental day and get our guys ready to go.”

The Cornhuskers will look to keep the momentum going from their big win this Friday, as they visit Iowa for a 9:30 p.m. ET game airing on Big Ten Network.