IU Coach Tom Crean got into his hotel room following IU’s overtime loss to Georgetown on Saturday around 4 p.m. and immediately began watching film on Nebraska.
He didn’t shut it off until 1:30 a.m. the next day.
That’s the level of intensity the Hoosier coach puts into game preparation. Crean and his Hoosier team will open Big Ten play against the Cornhuskers on at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday in Lincoln, Neb.
“The bottom line is, we are looking for any little nugget that we can find, outside of the basics, against that team,” Crean said on his radio show Monday. “We have to be really, really good on knowing their personnel. We have to do a great job of knowing who wants what.”
The Cornhuskers finished their nonconference slate 8-4 with losses to Rhode Island, Creighton, Incarnate Word and Hawaii. They also picked up a double-overtime win against Cincinnati earlier this month.
IU’s visit to Pinnacle Bank Arena will be its first true road game of the season, though Nebraska students won’t be in the building because of the winter break.
There’s a bit of an unknown as to how IU’s young players — including two freshmen guards in the starting lineup — will respond to their first true Big Ten road environment. Nebraska was 8-1 at home against Big Ten foes last year.
Last season, IU (10-3) let a few halftime leads on the road in league play slip away. Among those second-half slips was a 60-55 loss at Nebraska in January. IU was outscored by 18 points in the second half of that loss.
Crean described Nebraska and IU’s second Big Ten game against Michigan State as the two hardest road environments in the conference. To combat the hostility of the road arenas, IU has been blaring “heavy doses of football crowd noise” at practice leading into the matchups.
“Nebraska is one of the louder places, maybe in the country right now, but certainly in our league,” Crean said. “They provide a great environment in there. I think it will be good for us to go through it.”
Crean said playing a pair of games at Madison Square Garden and one in Indianapolis helped prepare IU for the road tests, but even New York had a healthy showing of IU fans, thanks to a large alumni base in the New York area.
Freshman guard James Blackmon, Jr., who will be getting his first taste of Big Ten play, said those neutral sites were helpful for him. He added that maintaining composure in an unfamiliar environment is mostly a matter of staying calm and collective.
Nebraska is favored by most sports betting websites and basketball statistics guru Ken Pomeroy, who has the Huskers favored by one point. But Blackmon feels like the season-opening conference game may be an opportunity to steal away a road win.
“We feel like we have a lot to prove to everybody, so we’re going to go out there and do that,” Blackmon said. “Every game is going to be a big game and we just know we’re going to have to bring our best every game.”
