Hey there.

Gary Parrish, welcome back to the CBS Sports Eye on College Basketball podcast where we sometimes

discuss camel fighting dodo birds and leaky black. If you're watching on YouTube, you know what to do to the like button. Shouts to Brandon Davies. And if you haven't yet subscribed to the CBS Sports College Basketball YouTube channel, please also do that while you're here. Let's get into it. Different deal today, as you'll soon realize. Matt Norlander is not here with me, and that's because

I'm in Chicago for Big Ten Media Day, and while here, I sat down with most of the coaches and some of the

players for quick conversations about their programs and college basketball in general, and we

figured, or at least we hoped, that you guys might like to listen to those conversations so

we're placing them in the i-owned college basketball feed it's me gp at big 10 media day the

conversations i had with coaches and players they are on tap i hope you enjoy them right after this word

from our partners.

Gary Parrish here with Nebraska head coach Fred Hoyberg heading into year seven.

I know last season didn't go exactly the way you wanted.

You had some injuries, but you did close with four straight wins and you won the college basketball, and had your team finished in the top 50 at Ken Palm? Can you draw anything from that

to carry over to this season? Yeah, it was a very strange season, Mary. You know, first of all,

you know, getting the news that we weren't going to have ring-mast, who was as important as anybody

on our team the year before when we played in the NCAA tournament, he led us in rebounding assist, and he was second our team in scoring. So obviously when you have a front court player that does so much for your team, that's a hard thing to replace. You know, we got off to a really good start, had a tough stretch in the middle of that, and then got at a really good winning streak. And, you know, a big part of that, we beat Ohio State at home, I think it was our fifth win in a row. And Burk-A Butingel, unfortunately, went down with a pretty nasty ankle injury and just never regained his form because he never got fully healthy again. And then we lost five in a row to finish, disappointing, but then we were grouped and found a way to go out and cut down the nets in that tournament in Vegas. And it did give us some momentum. You know, we were able to add some really good player. We actually had four, you know, the way the portal works now during the tournament while we were still playing. We got four commitments in that time, you know, which is very weird. But anyway, it was a good finish. I really like the group that we put together for this year. So I was talking to Tom Mizzow earlier, and he was not complaining, but lamenting, perhaps, about just sort of the state of recruiting and how you're now asked to do things that you were never asked to do before. In fact, in some ways you're required to do things that you were quite literally

told not to do before. And he just sort of said, hey, listen, I've reached the point, I think,

where I'm just not going to complain about it. I'm just going to focus on my team and try to run

my program the way I can run it as best I can and worry about that and nothing more. But it is weird to be trying to focus on your

current players, but then the transfer portal is open. And if you're not working on that, it's going to

impact your future. It is a weird time to be a college basketball coach. It's a very weird time.

And, you know, the really hard part about it is there's just so many unanswered questions for our future. And, you know, is there going to be a fifth year? And, you know, that affects the way that you might recruit, you know, as far as how many guys you're going to bring in. You know, we're just operating under the assumption that it's not going to happen until we hear otherwise. Because, you know, one week you hear it's going to happen.

The next week you say it's 100% not. It's almost whatever direction the wind's blowing, you know, is what you hear about the rule. So, you know, until you get clarity, you know, we're just going to operate under the current rule. And, you know, we had just done this candid coaches series at CBSports.com where we asked more than 100 coaches a variety of questions.

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