The basketball gods will need to have a humorousness. The NCAA Division I Males’s Basketball Committee actually does.
The committee gave the Nebraska males’s basketball staff its first at-large berth to the 68-team match for the primary time in a decade. NU can be a No. 8 seed.
The ninth seed and first opponent for Nebraska? Texas A&M. The varsity that simply this week swiped NU’s athletic director, Trev Alberts.
“Effectively this can be enjoyable,” Alberts posted on X. He put an emoji subsequent to it. A laughing face with a bead of sweat rolling down its brow. A&M’s ladies’s basketball staff performs the Husker ladies, too, at a subregional in Corvallis, Oregon.
Nebraska ladies’s basketball will play Texas A&M, that means each Husker hoops groups can be enjoying the Aggies within the NCAA match.
“Appears just a little bit scripted, doesn’t it?” NU guard and Millard South graduate Maddie Krull stated.
For basketball followers within the state, the entire week can be enjoyable. For the primary time within the historical past, the Creighton and Nebraska males’s and ladies’s basketball groups all certified for the NCAA match in the identical 12 months.
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The CU males, with maybe their greatest probability but to make the Ultimate 4, play Akron on Thursday in Pittsburgh. The Creighton ladies, a No. 7 seed, head to Los Angeles to play UNLV.
The day and website for the Trev Alberts Tip-Off Basic? Friday in Memphis. Husker males’s basketball coach Fred Hoiberg needed to chuckle. There’s usually some intelligent wrinkle for the committee, although Hoiberg questioned whether or not, for his story, if it’d be a special twist.
“Truthfully, I assumed they have been going to place us in a bracket with Iowa State,” the previous Cyclone participant and coached quipped.
Nope. Iowa State is coming to Omaha. And their fan base, largely simply two hours away, ought to blow into city with the staff for the Thursday/Saturday video games
Iowa State followers have a historical past of touring fairly properly to convention and NCAA tournaments, making whichever area they journey to a directional model of their house area, Hilton Coliseum.
So Omaha is poised to be “Hilton West” one week after Iowa State received the Huge 12 match in Kansas Metropolis’s T-Cellular Heart, which turned, throughout the Cyclones’ run Hilton South.
“Hopeful we’ll have a giant crowd once more come Thursday once we’re in Omaha,” ISU coach T.J. Otzelberger stated.
ISU will play Fifteenth-seeded South Dakota State, the Summit League champions the place Otzelberger as soon as coached. SDSU options three native Nebraskans, together with starter Charlie Easley, who graduated from Lincoln Pius and performed briefly at Nebraska earlier than transferring on to the Jackrabbits.
Iowa State and SDSU aren’t the one space groups headed to Omaha on Thursday. Tenth-seeded Drake will play seventh-seeded Washington State. The Bulldogs, who received the Missouri Valley match, function former Creighton basketball assistant Darian DeVries, whose son, Tucker, is without doubt one of the nation’s prime gamers.
Within the different two video games, sixth-seeded BYU will play Eleventh-seeded Duquesne — which misplaced to Nebraska earlier this 12 months — and third-seeded Illinois, which simply received the Huge Ten match, will play 14th-seeded Morehead State.
NCAA match guidelines don’t enable Creighton to play at CHI Well being Heart, the place CU is nominally the host for the primary and second rounds. However the Bluejays, additionally a 3 seed, have their very own little subplot in Pittsburgh, house of CU coach Greg McDermott’s favourite NFL staff, the Steelers.
The Bluejays begin with 14th-seeded Akron. Ought to they win there — and so they’ll be favored to take action — they’d play the winner of the sport between South Carolina and Oregon. The Geese are coached by Dana Altman, a CU legend who has received 327 video games because the Jays’ coach. McDermott has received 323, and will tie Altman by advancing to the Ultimate 4.
“We’ve had two coaches within the final 30 years at Creighton,” McDermott stated. “And we’ll each be in the identical quad.”
Pictures: Creighton and Nebraska basketball groups react because the 2024 NCAA match brackets are unveiled