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Hello. Today, I’m assuming you’re a time traveler who just arrived here from April 2002. First, thank you for subscribing to this newsletter. Yes, email still works great. Nothing else does, unfortunately.
This Is March: Nebraska is good at … what?
As you know, time traveler, the state of the world in your original April 2002 included the following:
- The Indiana Hoosiers had just reached the men’s basketball title game. Soon, they would surely return to the heights of the Bob Knight era, when they’d won three national championships. They remained bad at football, though.
- Similarly, the Nebraska Cornhuskers had just reached football’s BCS title game, an encouraging followup to Tom Osborne’s three title claims in the ’90s. They were still bad at basketball, though.
- The first Spider-Man movie was on the way.
Well, time traveler from 2002, I have bad news for you. Indiana hoops would miss March Madness entirely in 2004 — and hasn’t reached the Elite Eight since. Nebraska football also collapsed in 2004, unfathomably missing bowl season — something it’d then do eight more times. (And 2004 included the first Spider-Man sequel.)
For decades afterward, the Hoosiers desperately wanted ’70s and ’80s basketball back. Meanwhile, Huskers fans longed for ’90s football. They would both fire winning coaches who didn’t reach nostalgic levels of winning — Tom Crean and Frank Solich/Bo Pelini, respectively — before discovering their respective downfalls could actually get so much worse. In both cases, the blueblood years became ancient.
But all was not lost. Indiana suddenly became … a football school. I know! Here in the future, we can’t believe it either. The Hoosiers are the national champs right now! I swear! I was there!
It all started in November 2023, when the Hoosiers hired Curt Cignetti from a former FCS school named JMU. I-AA is called FCS now, yes. (2023’s Spider-Man movie was animated.) He then used something called “the transfer portal” to import JMU’s best players and would find an eventual Heisman-winning quarterback on Cal’s roster. Indiana and its boosters openly paid them money, which had become legal everywhere.
Time traveler, I’m going to need you to sit down for the next part, though. This is where it gets truly unbelievable. Ready?
Nebraska is good at men’s basketball now, ending decades of embarrassing nothingness. I’ll give you a moment.
That’s right. Just when Indiana became the thing Nebraska had longed to resume being, the opposite happened. The Cornhuskers won their first-ever men’s tourney game a few days ago, then did it again, beating Vanderbilt in a game-of-the-year contender to reach the Sweet 16. (Vandy is good at football in today’s times, too, but now I’m just overloading you.)
So on Thursday, Nebraska faces Big Ten rival Iowa in the Sweet 16. Oh yeah, Nebraska’s in the Big Ten, by the way.
Like Indiana football, Nebrasketball got here by hiring a proven winner — Fred Hoiberg, .673 at Iowa State before an NBA stint — who inspired players to change schools. Four of the Huskers’ top six contributors came from elsewhere (the other two are his son, Sam Hoiberg, and Lincoln native Braden Frager), and Hoiberg was actually a decade ahead of most coaches in embracing transfers.
In that light, Nebraska’s football-to-basketball switch makes sense. If I were a Huskers booster who saw my school hiring a former Sweet 16 coach, I would’ve started investing more of my money into hoops than into the steady, non-thrilling Matt Rhule. My money that wasn’t earmarked for the Huskers volleyball machine, at least.
A takeaway from the Nebraska-Indiana switcheroo: In the portal era, no well-funded athletic department is doomed to remain bad at any particular sport. When you snag the right coach, pivot in their direction, whether they’re part of your school’s most traditional sport or not. Also, if you’re going to swap identities, at least keep basically the same color scheme.
And yes, these things coincide with an upcoming Spider-Man movie. Granted, that’s been the case with about half the years so far in this millennium. At least there are some things we can depend on, in this world where Nebraska is Indiana, and vice versa.
More Madness:
- Reasons to be excited for each Sweet 16 game on the women’s and men’s sides. I’m amped for America to get a load of Nebraska’s elite defense going against Iowa’s meticulous tempo. For true shot-clock appreciators.
- Looking for Cinderella? Just pretend Iowa coach Ben McCollum is still coaching Drake University. His Hawkeyes roster makes that easy to imagine.
- The most viral moment from this March Madness: Maryland coach Brenda Frese giving an intense speech to junior guard Oluchi Okananwa, who loved it.
- In college sports, a significant roster budget is a cover charge. You’re not making it in the door without one. But a huge budget might not get you much further. Ask Kentucky.
- After Scranton’s women broke NYU’s 91-game win streak, second to only the 2014-17 UConn women in NCAA history, Denison beat Scranton in Saturday’s DIII title game.
Quick Snaps
🧢 A 6-foot-7 Irish rugby player named Neff Giwa is racking up Power 4 football scholarship offers after coaches saw a three-second clip of him in a lineman drill.
📰 News:
- “Oklahoma linebacker Owen Heinecke has filed a lawsuit against the NCAA as he continues to seek another year of eligibility.” He worked out at last month’s NFL combine. The draft is weeks away.
- Virginia quarterback Chandler Morris’ own bid for another year of eligibility comes down to 26 snaps in 2022. Explanation here.
- New Mexico State’s jersey sponsor: a local casino resort.
- President Trump used an executive order as a blog post, expressing he prefers Army-Navy in its current time slot. Until 2009, its traditional date was earlier in the season.
🚩 This past weekend, NFL players were humbled in flag football by the men’s U.S. team. It was fun, and I’ll keep confidently stumping for women’s college flag to become televised spring football.
Messy: Utah still wanted Whittingham, kind of
On Dec. 13, Kyle Whittingham announced he would no longer be Utah’s head coach, leaving after a 21-year run that included a No. 2 finish in 2008, a .668 overall winning percentage and an ascent from the Mountain West to FBS’ third-stablest conference.
Two weeks later, he was Michigan’s head coach. The hire felt like a surprise bailout for the sloppy Wolverines, greatly impressing rival coaches.
It also raised all sorts of questions about how and why the Utes had let him go. Thanks to newly revealed documents, we have a bit more insight. In short: It was weird stuff.
The whole report is worth a read. The oddest part, coming after Whittingham’s agent requested raises to the head coach’s salary, the NIL fund and the assistant coach budget:
“Instead, Utah offered an $8 million salary to return but with stipulations that longtime defensive coordinator and coach-in-waiting Morgan Scalley would have ‘full and final oversight in decision-making for the areas of football recruiting/player personnel staffing and the General Manager position’ and ‘complete decision-making authority over all football recruiting, roster management and staffing matters that impact the program beyond the 2026 football season.’”
Utah athletic director Mark Harlan then installed Scalley immediately after the 66-year-old Whittingham left.
Over the years, Harlan was reportedly tired of Whittingham’s uncertainties about exactly how long he’d keep coaching. Sure, that’s fair. But offering the program’s chief architect — whose team nearly made the Playoff last season, by the way — a semi-figurehead role, with a career assistant taking over the most critical head-coaching duties? Weird stuff!
As “The Audible” discusses, this looks like yet another example of coach-in-waiting setups not working.
Speaking of the new Spider-Man, here’s a paragraph most of you won’t care about at all. My daughter did, however. Including it here might mean some of her friends subscribe, slightly improving my numbers.
Everyone’s convinced this new Spider-Man movie will include Sadie Sink from “Stranger Things” bringing the X-Men into the MCU by playing Jean Grey. However, I’m staking out the theory that she’s playing Rogue. Seemingly wearing a green hood in the trailer, like Rogue did in 2000s comics? Starting out under the control of villains, perhaps like ’80s Rogue, and using vague powers that might not be Jean’s telepathy? A pretty overt Rogue reference in the trailer’s bus scene? You know, Sink is from a high school football family in Texas, meaning she could maybe deliver a rural Mississippi accent. Also, the first thing Rogue did in the comics was fight the Avengers, aka Spider-Man’s crew. I’ll spare you the rest. For now.
Last week’s most-clicked: Our interactive women’s and men’s brackets, with win probabilities for each tourney game.
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