Pitchin' with Pritch: Huskers need a miracle
Way back in November I was just sure this was the year the Husker Men would never have to worry about hearing “Well, let’s get ready to play in the NIT.”
I was wrong.
Coach Miles uttered those terrible initials last Saturday after the Huskers dropped a close game to Purdue at PBA.
Again the Huskers played hard most of the time but when nitty-gritty time came, they looked like the unstructured and undisciplined group they apparently are in their real basketball lives.
With the schedule ahead of the Huskers it will take some kind of basketball miracle to end the season above .500.
The Huskers are on the road at Michigan, Michigan State and end up the regular season at home against Iowa on March 10.
They have the Big 10 tournament after that, but the tournament will have the same teams the Huskers couldn’t beat in the regular season so nothing will come easy.
I hope some magical thing will happen and all of a sudden half of the 3-pointer attempts connect and half the 2-point attempts find the bottom of the net and 80 percent of the free-throws are good.
I have just described the type of basketball miracle it might take because they still have to play defense for forty minutes. You still have to have more points than your opponent in order to win.
Some sportswriters and TV people have mentioned on other games that teams that dribble too much end up causing the other four players to have the tendency to stand around and then just stand and watch. It happens with the Huskers also.
It probably isn’t going to change in the next few weeks since it has been happening all season.
Coach Miles’ basketball seat is probably pretty warm but he still has a sense of humor when talking about maybe being unemployed after the season.
He said if he gets fired he will still be a millionaire because of his buyout in his contract.
That caused him to catch a lot of criticism on social media but still the fans have come to watch.
There were over 9,000 fans there last Saturday for the Purdue game and the weather outside of PBA was frightful, but there wasn’t enough fire inside to be delightful.
The fans have turned out the entire season and that isn’t the case at a lot of places where the team is struggling.
Just to make my day as bad as it could get basketball-wise, KU goes to Texas
Tech and gets steamrolled. The JayHawks were down 25 at halftime and never recovered.
Tech did a great job offensively and defensively the entire game and there was no doubt which team was the best on the floor that day.
KU, which has won outright or shared the conference regular season championship for the last 14 years straight, is going to need one of those basketball miracles mentioned above if they hope to make it 15.
To make it worse, one of the teams that has a great chance to win the whole thing is that school down the road at Manhattan.
At least it isn’t Texas!
The bright spot of the day was Creighton defeating Georgetown up in Omaha.
I am ready to get fired up for March Madness and the NCAA tournament!