Sensing a severe lack of accomplishment — with a scoreboard nearby to back it up — Nebraska basketball coach Barry Collier benched his starters with 11 minutes left in Kansas University’s 96-54 beatdown of the Cornhuskers on Saturday.
Was it a lesson to Collier’s underachieving starters?
“I think there was a 40-minute lesson there, more so than just not playing those guys again,” Collier said. “They had not produced, so we gave some other guys a chance to see what they could do.”
Nebraska (12-5 overall, 2-2 Big 12 Conference) never has been a program to have much of a basketball tradition, but things rarely have reached a level of futility like Saturday’s implosion. Never before has a Collier-led team lost by more than 40 points, and only three other times in NU history has a final deficit been so darn disgusting.
“If you’ve got a brain, you can just look at the score and see we got beat by 40,” a grumpy Jason Dourisseau said. “That pretty much speaks for itself.”
Yeah, but how did it happen? Before this week’s 0-fer — Saturday’s massacre and an 88-75 loss to Iowa State — Nebraska was ninth in the nation in opponent shooting percentage, with foes connecting on just 38.6 percent of their shots.
For much of Saturday’s game, KU had that figure doubled before finishing 59.7 percent from the field and 61.1 percent from three-point range.
So long, top-10 ranking.
“Anything we tried to throw at them defensively — the press, the zone, the trap, the switch — they were on top of it,” Collier said. “They were the aggressor and kind of seized the day.”
To dump a five-gallon bucket of salt on the already agonizing wound, Nebraska shot 27 percent from the floor, and Collier said that in the first half, his Huskers were 4-of-19 shooting from inside eight feet.
Nebraska did have a better free-throw percentage than the Jayhawks.
But until charities are worth a baker’s dozen apiece, the Huskers can only shrug their shoulders and call their latest visit to Allen Fieldhouse a nightmare from the onset.
“They knocked down a lot of threes, they got a lot of transition buckets,” Dourisseau said. “They basically got whatever they wanted.”
Nebraska coaches and players spent about 15 minutes trying to dice and slice out an explanation to media as to how a 12-point underdog became a 42-point victim of abuse.
But providing the most insight was one blunt comment near the end of the session from Wes Wilkinson, Nebraska’s leading scorer coming in who dropped all of three points in 21 minutes against KU.
“We played terrible,” Wilkinson said, “and they played awesome.”
Sometimes, the best answers come with no digging whatsoever.
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