Nebraska and Iowa are together in the Sweet 16. It’s the basketball game no one envisioned before Selection Sunday — and no one expected until the matchup was set.

The No. 4 seed Huskers and No. 9 seed Hawkeyes collide in a South Regional semifinal Thursday night in Houston. Iowa knocked off Florida, the top seed and defending national champion, to get here. Nebraska, the final power-conference team to win a game in the NCAA Tournament, survived a scare against Vanderbilt in the Round of 32.

This Big Ten border rivalry is hot at the moment.

For basketball purists, it is far from the most attractive matchup of the next round. But Iowa-Nebraska delivers intrigue the other Sweet 16 pairings can’t match.

Path to the present

Nebraska and Iowa fans lived side by side in different conferences with only a handful of sports interactions for a century. Nebraska joined the Big Ten in 2011, but the rivalry vibes didn’t take root until 2014, when Huskers athletic director Shawn Eichorst fired football coach Bo Pelini, who had beaten Iowa in overtime two days earlier. When asked if the result mattered, Eichorst said, “In the final analysis, I had to evaluate where Iowa was.”

Whether Eichorst’s words were intentionally condescending or just naïve, they teed up the disrespect card for the Hawkeyes and their fans. Iowa has won 10 of the last 11 in football, and the series has graduated from moderate disdain to full-fledged rivalry. It reached a full boil in 2024 when Iowa police officers prevented Nebraska players from gathering at the Tigerhawk logo at midfield before the game and then the Huskers refused to shake hands with the Hawkeyes before the coin toss.

Both programs have other football rivalries that mean more historically, but on the hate scale, it has vaulted to the top spot for fans on both sides.

As for men’s basketball, Nebraska’s lack of historical success and Iowa’s fierce rivalries with other Big Ten programs kept their meetings out of the national spotlight. This year, things changed.

Escalation

Iowa and Nebraska did not play a basketball game of high stakes during the first 14 years that they shared the court as Big Ten opponents. Just one year ago, in fact, they met in March not for a trip to the Elite Eight but for the final spot in the 15-team Big Ten tournament.

But when Nebraska visited Iowa City on Feb. 17 as the No. 9 team in the AP poll, a new kind of storm awaited.

Iowa fans serenaded Nebraska forward Pryce Sandfort, who spent the previous two seasons playing for the Hawkeyes, with boos and insults. Then the Iowa defense clamped down on the Huskers’ record-setting shooter.

Hawkeyes star Bennett Stirtz got loose for 25 points, Sandfort finished with just 13, and Iowa secured a 57-52 win that prompted a court-storming, during which Nebraska coach Fred Hoiberg swatted a phone out of the hand of a student who confronted him in the handshake line. The Iowa administration issued an apology the next day.

All of it added juice to an emotionally charged March 8 rematch in Lincoln, when Nebraska honored perhaps the most impactful class of seniors in program history.

The Huskers lost a 10-point lead in the final five minutes of regulation as Kael Combs hit a second-chance 3 with 2.7 seconds to play, but Cael Jacobsen and Sam Hoiberg, the former walk-ons in the Nebraska backcourt, hit clutch shots in overtime as Nebraska pulled away 84-75 to earn a school-record-tying 26th win.

“They know what we like to do,” Sam Hoiberg said. “And we know what they like to do.”

In a matter of 19 days, the intensity around this basketball series jumped from a 4 on a 1-to-10 scale to a 9.

The fan factor

No. 2 seed Houston will be the de facto home team at the Toyota Center, home of the NBA’s Rockets. Right?

The Cougars, playing less than 3 miles from their campus, are sure to feel the love from fans who’ve anticipated a Houston appearance in this spot for weeks. Houston and coach Kelvin Sampson are favored to advance to the Final Four, a year after losing to Florida in the national championship game.

But don’t underestimate the impact of traveling Big Ten fans. Illinois, Nebraska and Iowa fans rate as some of the best nationally at supporting their programs, home and away. And fans of both participants in the first regional semifinal Thursday are hungry for a reason to celebrate.

Iowa last played in the Sweet 16 in 1999. For Nebraska fans, this is a first. The Huskers won an NCAA Tournament game for the first time in nine appearances last week in Oklahoma City. And Nebraska fans traveled some 15,000 strong, overwhelming almost every square inch inside and outside of the Paycom Center and earning praise from the mayor of Oklahoma City. Media members and other longtime tournament observers described the scene as the most lopsided they’d ever seen in the first weekend of tourney play at a neutral site.

“There’s no doubt they had a huge impact on us winning those two games,” Fred Hoiberg said.

Nebraska fans are not scaling back their palpable enthusiasm. They’ll descend upon Houston in big numbers, as will fans from Iowa. Some will share an airplane cabin en route to the site of the Sweet 16. The scenes in Houston on Thursday night might remind folks in Texas of another classic border battle: the annual Red River Rivalry football game contested in Dallas between Texas and Oklahoma.

Playing with house money

For some programs, reaching the Sweet 16 is the minimum standard of success. For Iowa and Nebraska, the regional semifinals feel more like a destination.

Nebraska’s past is well chronicled. The hope was simply to cap a record-setting season by collecting the school’s first NCAA Tournament victory. Now with two postseason wins, Big Red hearts are full.

Iowa made the NCAA’s second weekend regularly in the 1980s under Lute Olson and Tom Davis, but Davis hit a 10-year Sweet 16 drought that led to then-athletic director Bob Bowlsby choosing not to renew the coach’s contract. Davis bowed out in 1999 after taking the Hawkeyes to the Sweet 16. Even with a national player of the year in 2021 with Luka Garza or an NBA lottery pick in 2022 with Keegan Murray, the Hawkeyes hadn’t returned to the second weekend — until this year.

If Thursday’s opponent were anyone else, fans on both sides would greet a Sweet 16 exit this year with disappointment but pride. They still will in time. But the winning fan base will lord it over the loser, which will garner nervous energy on both sides of the Missouri River. — Scott Dochterman

The future

Iowa hired Ben McCollum as head coach a year and a day ago. McCollum retained one player from the 2024-25: forward Cooper Koch, who had redshirted.

Fred Hoiberg inherited a similar roster predicament seven years ago. The difference? Hoiberg won seven games in his first season (and in his second), whereas McCollum has coached Iowa into the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament.

The early ascension bodes well for Iowa under McCollum, a 44-year-old hoops wiz. Imagine where he might take the Hawkeyes when he has ample time to construct a lineup and allow for players to develop in Iowa City.

Nebraska built slowly under Hoiberg. Despite the 28-6 mark this season, he’s 112-114 overall with the Huskers. If Nebraska advances to the Final Four, its coach will get to .500 for the first time since he was 4-4 in December 2019.

Nebraska posted consecutive 20-win seasons before this year but did not attract much national notice during its climb. The Huskers entered this season as a 500-to-1 long shot to win the national championship. They are the lowest-seeded team to make a Sweet 16 with 500-to-1 or higher title odds at the season’s start since 2010, according to The Action Network.

No matter the result Thursday, Iowa and Nebraska will enter the offseason better positioned than at any other time this century to maintain this level of success or improve on it. They don’t spend like Kentucky or Duke — or like the perennial powers of the Big Ten — but the systems their coaches run do not require five-star-laden rosters.

They craft teams that perform better than the sum of their parts. Expect neither coach to deviate from the style that got him to Houston. — Mitch Sherman

What to expect

Sherman: Keep an eye on how the game is called early. The more the officials let them play, the better it is for Iowa, which was whistled for just 14 fouls in its February win against Nebraska. Iowa wants to play with physicality and restrict the Huskers’ flow on offense. “It’s going to be tough, but it’s also a game of will,” Nebraska forward Rienk Mast said. “Whoever imposes their will on the other team is going to win.”

Dochterman: When conference foes face off for the third time in barely five weeks, the scouting reports are well-known. The teams know each other well. Both are competitive. It comes down to details within the margins. Who picks up their second foul in the first 10 minutes? Who misses more open 3-point attempts? Who converts and-1s? It’s almost unpredictable.