Nebraska men’s basketball overcame a 14-point second-half deficit to beat UCF 77-66 for the inaugural College Basketball Crown championship on Sunday in Las Vegas.
“Really proud of everybody that stepped up. Couldn’t be more proud of the guys for how this thing ended,” Coach Fred Hoiberg said. “It’s a lot better feeling than when we were sitting at home on whatever that last game against Iowa was when you didn’t know what was going to happen.”
The Crown championship is the first postseason tournament championship for the Huskers since the 1996 NIT title, and the program is now officially unbeaten in the month of April.
“We never wavered from when we were in the meetings or we were in a film session or we were on the court,” Hoiberg said. “It was all in for the guys and it paid off for them.”
The title game was the toughest of the week for the Huskers. They built a 10-point first-half lead and saw that wither away with an 10-plus-minute field goal drought — the last 4:58 of the first half to the first 5:24 of the second half.
That is when they got back to getting stops that resulted in transition opportunities. They put together a 22-3 run featuring a personal Juwan Gary 7-0 spurt, Connor Essegian scoring 11 and two Andrew Morgan dunks to take a 59-52 lead with 7:27 left in the game. The Huskers never looked back and built as much as a 12-point lead with 2:35 left in the game.
“We came out here focused and stayed together as a group and played some pretty darn good basketball here this week,” Hoiberg said.
Not only was the win the first postseason tournament win since 1996, it secured the Huskers’ 21st win of the season, tying for the seventh-most in school history. The win on Sunday gave them 44 victories in the last two seasons, the second-highest consecutive two-year total in program history behind 45 wins 1990-92.
“We went out on top,” Brice Williams said. “Not too many teams can say they finish the season with a win.”
Williams’ two free throws with 1:10 remaining gave him his 16th and 17th points of the game, which gave him the single-season record for most points in school history, passing James Palmer Jr.’s 708 in 2018-19.
“It was a blessing to be able to achieve that,” Williams said. “It’s something that I hope lasts over a long time, but it might not with the way Fred coaches and the way he wants us to get up 3s … It’s a great achievement.”
He would make four more from the charity stripe to give him 21 points in the game, finishing with 713 on the season.
“It is a special, special two years Brice had. To score over 1,000 points, that is not easy to do, especially when you jump up a level. That is one thing you understand in today’s age of the portal. Most of the time when players jump up a level their production goes down. For Brice it was perfect for him I think with everything he did … Obviously we are going to miss him.”
Essegian matched Williams with 21 points to lead the Huskers, but another big Juwan Gary game earned the senior tournament MVP honors. He finished with 20 points, eight rebounds and two steals despite briefly leaving the game with an apparent head injury. Gary averaged 19.0 points on 51.8% from the field (57.1% from 3) and 8.0 rebounds in Nebraska’s four games in Vegas.
After the game, Gary and Williams shared a long embrace on the court.
These two. 🥹 pic.twitter.com/GZV9J4G3OG
— Nebraska Men's Basketball (@HuskerMBB) April 7, 2025
All-Tournament Team
- Juwan Gary, Nebraska (MVP)
- Brice Williams, Nebraska
- Tyson Degenhart, Boise State
- Eric Dixon, Villanova
- Darius Johnson, UCF
