Nebraska Confirms Planning For 16-Team Tournament Underway

While the Husker football team is headed east to face Iowa on the Friday or Saturday following Thanksgiving, the Nebraska Cornhuskers basketball team will be hosting its own 16-team tournament in a Lincoln “bubble.” While it was confirmed by at statement issued by Nebraska yesterday the team will not be participating in the Myrtle Beach Invite after all, other sources confirmed privately the athletic department will be announcing in the coming days participants in a 16-team field being hosted in Lincoln.

What does this mean for Lincoln and Nebraska? Well, for starters it means basketball will be taking over the Bob Devaney Sports Center again for a while! Both Pinnacle Bank Arena and the Devaney Center will be used for games in the tournament. The event will be hosted by a third party for legal and liability reasons, and daily anti-gen testing is expected to be a component as well.

The school is targeting opening day of the season, Nov, 25 for the official start date. Not all teams have been confirmed yet, but it is expected there will be teams ranging from the Big XII, SEC, Pac-12, Mountain West, Missouri Valley, Western Athletic Conference, and West Coast Conference. The Pac-12 has not officially voted to overturn their previous decision that winter sports at member schools would not resume until at least January 1, 2021, but it has been reported they are meeting later today to do just that.

As for the rest of the Husker basketball schedule, the ACC-Big Ten Challenge is still being planned. It seems unlikely the planned 16-team field for the tournament in Lincoln would provide for less than three games in the tournament, so that would leave Nebraska with three other non-conference games to fill in addition to the 20-game conference schedule.