Big Ten Basketball: Week 9 power rankings

Nebraska remains at No. 7 in this week’s power rankings despite losing their only game since last week’s edition came out. The Cornhuskers are still looking pretty strong heading into this week’s action despite the loss.

The reason for the lack of worry by their loss last week was because it came at the hands of the Purdue Boilermakers in West Lafayette. Purdue may be playing as well as anyone in the country, and it is always hard to win at Mackey Arena. The Huskers fell in this contest by a score of 74-62.

The Huskers shot just 35.7% from the field in the second half and allowed 12 offensive rebounds to a much bigger Boilermakers team. This was to be expected, but Tim Miles has to be a little disappointed with his team’s effort on the glass.

The Cornhuskers also struggled to find any scoring outside of their two main guys, James Palmer (15.6 ppg) and Isaac Copeland (12.4 ppg, 6.4 rpg). Palmer had 22 points, while Copeland had 16, but no other player reached double figures for Nebraska. The rest of the team shot 9-29 from the field.

Third leading scorer Glynn Watson Jr. was held to just 7 points on 2 of 10 shooting. The Huskers need more of a contribution from other players, especially their bench to win games against good teams like Purdue.

Schedule for this week:

Wisconsin (9-8, 2-2) at Nebraska on Jan. 9

Nebraska at Penn State (12-5, 2-2) on Jan. 12

Illinois (10-7, 0-4) at Nebraska on Jan. 15