[Husker] Nebraska 61, Texas Tech 59

Tue Feb 6 21:36:30 CST 2007

5-foot-9 inch Senior point guard Charles Richardson drills at three-pointer at the buzzer to beat Bobby Knight and the Red Raiders in Lubbock!!  Un-bee-leeeev-able finish!!

The Huskers were down 29-16 at the break after the Red Raiders concluded the half on a 21-2 run!  NU was flat on their back, missing shots, turning it over and basically goin' nowhere.  They were, however, playing decent defense.  

Freshman guard Jay-R Strowbridge has shown a lot lately, and he led a 12-5 run by NU to start the second half with five quick points.  The run stretched to 17-8 as Aleks Maric, who did relatively nothing productive offensively in the first half, hit his second three-pointer of the year from the left corner.  That made it 37-33.

Then Marcus Perry went to work.  The Husker zone-busting senior REALLY heated up for NU, after a personal slow start to the game.  NU was down 51-42 until Perry drained three straight "give me the darned ball" three-pointers.  He wanted the ball, NU set him up, and he knocked 'em down.  Perry's two free throws at the 2-minute mark made it 53-53.  Marcus scored all 13 of his points after halftime.

Richardson hit two free throws to extend an NU run to 17-6 and give NU their first lead at 58-57 since being up 14-12 in the first half.  Martin Zeno hit a pair of free throws to give Tech the lead.  Perry had an open look at a three but couldn't get it to go down.  NU then played some great defense to force Tech into a bad shot with the shot clock winding down.  NU got the rebound to set up the final, crazy sequence of events. 

Perry got the ball left wing and put it up with about ten seconds to play.  A long rebound came off to the right and a Tech player grabbed the ball falling out of bounds.  It looked like he thought about attempting to call a timeout while sailing out-of-bounds (I think that is now illegal to do in the college game, if I recall correctly).  He couldn't save it to his own player, so he flipped it back onto the court to save it from going out of bounds.  It went right to Charles Richardson, about 21 feet out on the right wing.  He grabbed it ... shot it ... and it hit nothing but the bottom of the net at the buzzer.  

The NU bench erupted and Doc Sadler gave his boss (the AD made the trip) a double high-five behind the bench.

Doc just said on his radio show, "what a difference eight days makes, huh?"  How impressive is it (and how well coached is NU?) that the Huskers get drilled on Big Monday, then rebound with back-to-back conference road wins at Columbia and Lubbock?!!  Un-real.

Sadler somehow has this gutty, under-sized, over-achieving squad at 14-8 and 3-5 in the conference.  Top Ten-rated Texas A&M is the best team that I've seen in the league this year, and they visit Lincoln on Saturday.  They drilled Texas last night 100-82 following their big win on Saturday in Lawrence.

Wow.  We have a great up-and-coming basketball coach who notched a huge, signature win tonight.  I'm still on the ceiling.  

Dave Norris

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