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LAS VEGAS — Of the eight teams that kickstarted the College Basketball Crown on Monday across four games at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, where a new postseason tournament was officially born, none brought more supporters with them to Sin City than Nebraska. Widely recognized as one of the most passionate and loyal fan bases in collegiate athletics, the Cornhuskers’ faithful flocked to the desert despite watching head coach Fred Hoiberg’s team drop its last four games of the regular season and its opening-round matchup in the Big Ten Tournament. But for them, any chance to back Nebraska is a chance worth taking.
So they flew to Las Vegas eager and hoping for at least one more virtuoso performance from star guard Brice Williams, a first-team all-conference performer who ranks sixth nationally in scoring among players from the power leagues with a scoring average of 20 points per game. They’d watched Williams pour in a school-record 43 points against Ohio State earlier this month and exceed 20 points on 17 occasions throughout the season. They knew he was one of the most talented scorers in the country, and that fact alone would give Nebraska a fighting chance to win this tournament, where the Cornhuskers are among the best two or three teams on paper. Williams, they believed, could be the event’s breakout performer on a team that hasn’t won a postseason competition of any kind since capturing an NIT title in 1996. He’s the type of player that the NBA scouts in attendance want to see.
The anticipation and expectation that Nebraska’s fans attached to Williams was audible from the opening minutes against Arizona State, whenever the 6-foot-7, 214-pound veteran touched the ball. “Let him cook!” one fan shouted from a courtside seat as Williams isolated his defender. “Oh, that’s money!” another yelled when Williams walked into a 3-pointer from the top of the key shortly thereafter. The dialogue continued for the better part of two hours amid a 30-point effort from Williams in which he kept the Cornhuskers afloat in the first half and then secured victory in the second by scoring 11 points in the final three minutes. With an 86-78 victory, Nebraska moved onto the quarterfinals and will face Georgetown on Wednesday evening.
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“Brice was phenomenal the entire game,” Hoiberg said.
In truth, Williams has been phenomenal all season as the unquestioned best player for a team that endured parabolic waves of emotion: the 12-2 start that included wins over Creighton, Indiana and UCLA; the six-game losing streak in January that sunk Hoiberg’s team to 2-7 in conference play; the back-to-back victories over Illinois and Oregon, both of which made the NCAA Tournament; the five straight losses from Feb. 19 through March 9 that called into question whether the Cornhuskers would play postseason basketball of any kind after reaching the Big Dance last year.
But through every peak and valley, every high and low, Nebraska could always rely on Williams as its headlining act. He gave them 32 points in the championship game of the Diamond Head Classic, an in-season tournament played in Hawaii during the Christmas break. He gave them 27 points in an overtime win over then-No. 18 Illinois on Jan. 30 to ignite a run of four straight wins. He gave them six consecutive 20-point games across the dog days of winter and scored 47 of his team’s 111 combined points (42.3%) in narrow, low-scoring losses to then-No. 15 Michigan and Minnesota in the span of a week. That his shooting percentage improved from 44.4% during the 2023-24 campaign to 46.8% this season — all while upping his scoring average by nearly seven points per game — speaks to how impressive Williams’ development has been.
Which is why it came as no surprise on Monday evening when Williams, a fifth-year senior playing his final week of college basketball, scored 11 of his team’s 13 points during a particularly torrid stretch in the opening half. His repertoire included a mid-range jumper over the top of a defender followed by the nifty use of a screen, and re-screen, from big man Andrew Morgan for a 3-pointer from the top of the key. He buried another triple two possessions later and eventually drew a shooting foul on a subsequent 3-point attempt after curling around a pick, racking up 13 points in the opening half even as Nebraska fell behind by eight. None of his teammates scored more than six.
“I just didn’t think that we were playing with the fire that we needed to win a basketball game against a very talented team,” Hoiberg said, later adding: “I give our guys a lot of credit. They responded in a big way.”
Their response was in keeping with the mindset Hoiberg’s team adopted when deciding whether to accept an invitation to the College Basketball Crown. It was in mid-March when Williams reportedly told his teammates that the Cornhuskers would only participate in a postseason tournament if everyone on the roster agreed to join. He didn’t want Nebraska arriving in Las Vegas, or some other locale, with a skeleton crew diminished by potential opt-outs and transfers. That scenario wouldn’t have been conducive to chasing both the College Basketball Crown and the NIL money that is attached to this event.
But even with a complete roster, Nebraska found itself trailing by double digits early in the second half before embarking on an impressive, prolonged 32-12 run that all but extinguished the Sun Devils’ hope for an upset. A flurry of transition baskets from small forward Juwan Gary (18 points) gave way to an offensive explosion from shooting guard Connor Essegian (17 points), a Wisconsin transfer who had only reached double figures three times in the previous eight games since Feb. 5. Between them, Gary and Essegian scored 17 straight in the span of six minutes to transform a three-point deficit into an eventual four-point lead with 4:54 remaining.
“That sparked us,” Williams told FOX Sports. “That gave us a little bit of energy, gave us a little bit of encouragement, showed that we had a little bit of life in us [and] injected the crowd with a lot of energy.”
From then on, and with renewed momentum, Williams reasserted himself as Nebraska’s alpha and one of the better closers in college basketball this season, evidenced by his 89.4% clip at the free-throw line. Williams buried seven of eight attempts from the charity stripe over the final 1:37 once Arizona State decided to foul, bolstering his clutch shooting with a transition dunk and slashing layup that officially put the game out of reach.
He was there early, he was there late, he was there when it mattered most to ensure Nebraska’s season lasts at least a few days longer.
“I think I’ve definitely shown throughout the season that I can make free throws at a high clip, especially in crunch time,” Williams told FOX Sports. “But then it was kind of my teammates that looked for me, made sure I got the ball. And then if I couldn’t get the ball, they just made plays and fed off different matchups. We fed off of each other.”
Michael Cohen covers college football and college basketball for FOX Sports. Follow him on Twitter @Michael_Cohen13.
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