Could This Year's Nebraska Volleyball Team Be The Best Ever?

Nebraska rolled past another opponent on Friday night, this time taking down the Wisconsin Badgers in six sets: 25-22, 25-19, 25-13.

“That’s the best team in the country right now,” Wisconsin head coach Kelly Sheffield said after getting swept by Nebraska. “If you’ve got aspirations of going toe to toe with them at the end of the season, and they’re the standard, right?”

On Volleyball Late, the all-new Nebraska volleyball postgame show, Jeff Sheldon and Lincoln Arneal unpacked the performance and then answered a question from a viewer about where this team could stack up historically. Is it possible they could be the best ever?

Below is a lightly edited transcript of a portion of their conversation.

Jeff: Let’s put this Nebraska team in a little bit different context. Nebraska was No. 1 in the country in the Coaches Poll. Were they No. 1 in the RPI? Or were they just barely behind?

Lincoln: They were barely behind. They're like two hundredths behind Texas.

Jeff: So here's what happened [Friday night], if you were perhaps not paying attention to other parts of college volleyball, Texas suffered their first loss. Texas lost in the fifth set to Texas A&M, 15-13. They're 18-1 now, so Nebraska’s gonna be number one in the RPI. Missouri went on the road and won at No. 16 Tennessee. Iowa State handed Arizona State, a top 10 team, their first in the Big 12 in Ames in five. And then Arizona, which got swept by Texas Tech last weekend, upset No. 13 TCU.

Lincoln: I saw they're up 2-0. I didn't see the end of that match. Also, SMU lost to No. 21 North Carolina.

Jeff: That's right. Thank you for adding that. And so maybe the larger point is there's a lot of parity, it seems like in college volleyball this year. Texas, this is their first loss. But man, they had some close shaves earlier in the year. We've seen that we've seen them be vulnerable. Texas also lost [Friday night] despite hitting like .325. So I don't know exactly how you do that.

Lincoln: You know what the issue is? Their defense; their block is not good. That's Texas's one vulnerability.

Jeff: So Nebraska right now and you don't want to jinx anything, but like seems to be the team that is is able to, even on a night where it maybe doesn't play its best, still find a way to put the clamps down on teams and win. And is that just sort of what a defense-focused team or a team with as good a defense as Nebraska has can do?

Harper Murray (left) and Dani Busboom Kelly chat before the start of the second set. — Dani Busboom Kelly has Harper Murray and the rest of her Cornhuskers rolling so far in 2025. | Amarillo Mullen

Lincoln: Yeah, I think this is maybe a basketball cliche, but a defense travels. If you have a good defense, you can really bring other teams kind of down into the mud and slog matches down.

[Wisconsin head coach] Kelly Sheffield, I think he said, this is the best offensive team he's seen at Nebraska during his tenure at Wisconsin. He politely declined to answer if this is the best team in Nebraska, but he definitely said this best offensive team he's ever seen in Nebraska.

Jeff: By the numbers, it certainly is. Nebraska's hitting .337 now on the year after this match. It’s almost impossible, I think at this point for them to not finish the season hitting better than .300. So they're going to become the first Husker team since 2007 to do that.

I want to put up a comment and I think you and I probably feel the same way about this; Mike asked this, actually, right before the show started. Says, “This is a big if, but if Nebraska doesn't drop another set this season, are they a contender for the best team of all time? Does the parity in modern volleyball outweigh 2008 Penn State?”

I think you would have to be a pretty darn special team to put up numbers that would justify me saying that someone was better than 2008 Penn State, who dropped just two sets on the entire year.

Lincoln: To Nebraska.

Jeff: And had like four Olympians on the team. At least three and maybe four. So just an incredible amount of talent that that team had. And Nebraska is very talented, but I don't know that they're going to go the rest of the season without losing a set. And they've already dropped however many they have.

Rebekah Allick reacts after a kill against Northwestern. — Rebekah Allick is a big reason why Nebraska's playing at such a high level in 2025. | Kenny Larabee, KLIN

Lincoln: Six!

Jeff: Oh, that's right, because Utah beat them in a set.

Lincoln: Utah, of all teams. Utah, Pitt, then two from Kentucky, two from Creighton.

I agree. I think that the floor is definitely a lot higher now than it was in 2008. There's a lot of other teams, but also it's kind of hard to put this year in context to it. Compared to last year, the talent level is down because you got rid of all the COVID seniors and the transfer portal evens a lot of things out too.

So for Nebraska to have a juggernaut of a team, it says something, but I think everyone else is very good. I don't know that there's lot of other great teams.

Watch the full episode below!

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