Tim Miles, Nebrasketball, and Waiting for the Other Chainsaw to Drop
I will always be a Tim Miles fan.
Ever since he strutted into Lincoln like some kind of one-line cracking, bespectacled basketball dweeb that had some kind of alchemic brand of basketball nerdiness and swag, he had me trying to Merriam-Webster some kind of Frankenstein adjective together to describe him (*Author’s note: “nocky” for nerd-cocky is still my favorite).
While I could never quite pin down exactly the right kind of word to describe Tim Miles, I did have the right words to describe the Nebraska basketball program before he arrived. Moribund. Decaying. Decrepit. Stuck.
To his credit, he almost immediately shifted that narrative.
With a new arena, a Scrooge McDuck pile of money, and a few transfers, Miles dropped what was the hottest debut album Nebraska hoops fans had ever seen.
Nebraska was napalm hot down the stretch in 2014, made the tournament, and finished 4th in Big Ten. Miles walked on water, then turned that water into wine, and then all of Nebraska had a party.
We had found success. We had found a future. We had found our coach.
The sound of the nail going into the coffin is different each time.
Sometimes it’s an exclamatory, thunderous sound of a coach howling like a hat-whipping lycanthrope at his athletic director. We’ve heard that auditory grenade go off in our state before. (*See: Pelini, Bo)
Other times it sounds like a puzzled, whispered southern drawl (*See: Sadler, Doc) that can’t seem to find the words.
Wednesday night, in a half-empty Pinnacle Bank Arena, with my daughter on my lap and my son chewing through Colby-Ridge like it was the cure for boredom, it sounded like three chainsaws cutting through the air.
It sounded like “Mad” Chad Taylor the chainsaw juggling comic, whipping potential amputation in well-practiced circles as he tried to get Nebraska fans to give him a little energy.
It was seven degrees outside. It was negative 22 inside.
“Come on, Lincoln!” He shouted. Or some other halftime show platitude.
Lincoln did not come on.
In fact, Lincoln was so concerned about our 20-point first half, our 22% FG percentage, and our tilt-a-whirl spiral to the subterranean depths of the Big Ten that even some hair-gelled bro tossing a whole aisle of Home Depot into the air had minimal impact on our energy levels.
After the chainsaws themselves failed to hack through our collective malaise, and Mad Chad had gone back under the stands to gas up his chainsaws and grease down his hair, Nebraska continued to stumble towards their 8th loss in 10 games.
Mercifully, the other team was just hateable enough for Nebraska fans to turn their angst bullhorns towards the Terrapins, or Tim Miles might have been less concerned with the sounds of chainsaws and more concerned with the sounds of the ax that seems inevitably heading his direction.
I will always be a Tim Miles fan but, at this point, it’s starting to feel a little too familiar. A little too similar. Redundantly repetitive. Less Groundhog Day, at this point, than it is Happy Death Day.
In every Tim Miles season at Nebraska save one, he has had a team go on at least a 5-game losing streak, so this is not new territory. That we were able to recover from this precipitous swoon and somehow go on a miraculous 10–3 run to close out the aforementioned 2013–14 season is has proven to be much more the outlier than the norm.
That’s not to say that it can’t happen again.
Just to say that it’s hard to get a coffin lid off, once it’s nailed halfway shut.
Then again, we do know a guy with three chainsaws…
