All my life, I’ve been an East Coast guy. Never been to Iowa; never been to Nebraska.
If you talk to me about their corn, it’s my responsibility to politely tell you that Jersey corn is superior.
But the only game I’m interested in among Thursday’s quartet of Sweet 16 contests is Iowa-Nebraska.
Two Big Ten rivals whose football teams regularly score 13-10 when they play, and who have no modern history to speak of in men’s basketball? A 9-on-4 game in the Sweet 16 with a bunch of Midwestern players and guys from Türkiye and the Netherlands running around?
It’s a sick thing. Inject it into my veins.
I wrote about Nebrasketball in this space earlier in the season, and since then the Cornhuskers have completed their best season in program history by earning a No. 1 seed in the nation. 4 in the NCAA Tournament and won their first two tournament games. Nebraska is the last power conference school yet to win a game in the tournament.
Which makes the end of their season somewhat of a failure. I wonder how many people will remember Nebraska’s 28-7 campaign, versus how many will just remember this ending:
“What has happened?!” exclaimed play-by-play pro Kevin Harlan.
What they didn’t realize in real time was that Nebraska only had four players on the field, with Rienk Mast half-running to the check-in desk in the background, no doubt realizing he was too late.
An open dunk for Alvaro Folgueiras and the next foul shot came after Tate Sage and Braden Frager (yes, their real names) exchanged threes for a three-point lead on Iowa. His dunk was a killer. Final score: Iowa 77, Nebraska 71. The Hawkeyes, bye in the Elite Eight against Illinois, ensured at least one Big Ten team would reach the Final Four.
Nebraska coach Fred Hoiberg did the right thing and wasn’t going to let Mast make a four-man defense mistake. When Mast was asked to explain what happened, Hoiberg interrupted.
“Put it on me,” Hoiberg said. “It was a miscommunication and I’m the head coach, so put the burden on me.”
This is sure to anger Nebraska fans, as Hoiberg has had a reputation as an excellent coach since his tenure at Iowa State, but it took him a while to get the Cornhuskers out of the mud. Of course, this would be true for any coach in that spot, but Huskers fans were ready to make up their minds three years before the Nebraska AD issued a statement endorsing Hoiberg long-term.
Soon enough, Hoiberg managed to turn things around, with three straight 20-win seasons, the inaugural College Basketball Crown title, and now the Sweet 16. But his team’s season ended with an inexcusable coaching error.
The real coaching star of the game was Ben McCollum. Many people just watching don’t realize that the man has posted a 38-8 record in NCAA Tournament play: He won four Division II national titles and took Drake to the Round of 32 in his only season there. Then he showed up in Iowa City and took the Hawkeyes to a place they hadn’t been since the 1980s, an Elite Eight.
He coached a national champion to knock off a No. 1 seed. 1 in the previous round.
And just look at him. Hair. Shirt and tie, in an era where everyone wears the same athletic attire on the sidelines. He exudes a college basketball coach.
So one of the best stories of the 2025-26 season ended in unclear fashion. Iowa has won 10 of the last 11 meetings with Nebraska in football. The Hawkeyes just knocked out the Huskers in the circle. And we can’t forget…
PakarPBN
A Private Blog Network (PBN) is a collection of websites that are controlled by a single individual or organization and used primarily to build backlinks to a “money site” in order to influence its ranking in search engines such as Google. The core idea behind a PBN is based on the importance of backlinks in Google’s ranking algorithm. Since Google views backlinks as signals of authority and trust, some website owners attempt to artificially create these signals through a controlled network of sites.
In a typical PBN setup, the owner acquires expired or aged domains that already have existing authority, backlinks, and history. These domains are rebuilt with new content and hosted separately, often using different IP addresses, hosting providers, themes, and ownership details to make them appear unrelated. Within the content published on these sites, links are strategically placed that point to the main website the owner wants to rank higher. By doing this, the owner attempts to pass link equity (also known as “link juice”) from the PBN sites to the target website.
The purpose of a PBN is to give the impression that the target website is naturally earning links from multiple independent sources. If done effectively, this can temporarily improve keyword rankings, increase organic visibility, and drive more traffic from search results.