Fifty miles, 59 meetings, and an all-time series that comes down to a single game. Here’s where things stand before the Bluejays and Huskers meet again on Dec. 5 in Omaha.
There are older rivalries in college basketball. There are louder ones. There are even a couple that sit tighter on the all-time ledger, like Calvin and Hope up in Michigan. But you will not find many Division I series where, after a century of trying, one game is the whole difference.
Creighton leads Nebraska 30–29 all time. That’s it. That’s the whole margin after 103 years, 59 games, five different arenas, and more mood swings than a Nebraska December. If the Huskers win at CHI Health Center on Dec. 5, the series goes level at 30–30 for the first time since December 2018.
That’s the number to keep in your pocket this fall.
The series has never been a straight line
The two schools first played on March 3, 1923, in Omaha, and Creighton won 46–24. Then the series basically wandered off. Seven games got scattered across the 1920s and early ’30s, the last of them in March 1932, and nobody scheduled another one for 45 years.
Since 1977 they’ve played every single season, almost always in early December. And in that stretch the rivalry has behaved less like a back-and-forth and more like a series of long, ugly droughts for whichever side is currently losing.
Nebraska won seven straight from 1990 through 1997, including a 100–83 night in Lincoln and a 97–63 wipeout the year before that. By January 1997 the Huskers had pushed the all-time lead to 20–9. An eleven-game cushion. Comfortable.
Creighton has gone 21–9 since.
The Bluejays then ran off seven consecutive wins of their own from 2011 to 2017, drew the series even at 25–25 in 2016, and took the outright lead in 2017 for the first time since the Coolidge administration. Nebraska hasn’t led the all-time series since Dec. 7, 2016.
Now the Huskers have won two in a row, and the whole thing is one basket from being tied again.
What’s actually happened lately
Nine of the last ten meetings have been decided by double digits. This is not a rivalry that produces buzzer-beaters. It produces beatdowns, and the direction flips without much warning.
| Season | Site | Result |
| 2016 | Lincoln | Creighton 77–62 |
| 2017 | Omaha | Creighton 75–65 |
| 2018 | Lincoln | Nebraska 94–75 |
| 2019 | Omaha | Creighton 95–76 |
| 2020 | Omaha | Creighton 98–74 |
| 2021 | Lincoln | Creighton 77–69 |
| 2022 | Omaha | Nebraska 63–53 |
| 2023 | Lincoln | Creighton 89–60 |
| 2024 | Omaha | Nebraska 74–63 |
| 2025 | Lincoln | Nebraska 71–50 |
Creighton is 6–4 over that span and still owns the largest recent margin, a 29-point job in Lincoln in 2023. But Nebraska has taken the last two, including a 71–50 dismantling last December where the Huskers led 33–19 at the half and never let it get interesting.
Worth noting for the trip to Omaha: Nebraska has won the last two played there, in 2022 and 2024. A third would be the first time the Huskers have won three straight in Omaha since the mid-1990s.
The scoreboard is only one way to stack these two up. RallyFuel’s school rivalry comparison puts any two programs next to each other on NIL, fan engagement, rankings, and championships. Set the sport to basketball and pick Creighton and Nebraska.
The Saturday thing
Dec. 5 will be the first Saturday meeting since 2019, which matters more than it sounds like it should.
Nebraska is 6–7 all time against Creighton on Saturdays in Omaha, and 3–6 in those games since the series resumed in 1977. The Huskers’ last Saturday win in Omaha came in 1991, a 90–85 result. Since then: 2007, 2017, 2019, all losses, the last one by 19.
Small sample, sure. Weird streaks are what rivalry weeks are built on.
A new voice on the Creighton bench
The biggest change heading into this one has nothing to do with the schedule. Greg McDermott retired after last season, ending a run that made him Creighton’s all-time winningest coach, and Alan Huss now has the program.
That means Fred Hoiberg will face a Creighton head coach not named McDermott for the first time since the 2010–11 season. Sixteen years of familiarity, gone in one offseason.
Huss inherits a roster in transition, and a program whose recruiting approach has shifted a lot in recent years. Creighton announced eight newcomers in August, and fans get their first look during exhibitions at Iowa State on Oct. 18 and at home against Minnesota on Oct. 23. The Bluejays open for real on Nov. 2 against Kansas City, the earliest start by date in program history, before a non-conference slate that includes Kansas State, Iowa in Des Moines, the Players Era in Las Vegas, and Gonzaga at home a week after the Nebraska game.
Nebraska comes in from the other direction, off the best season in program history and a Sweet 16 run. Rienk Mast and Sam Hoiberg were the top two scorers in last December’s win over Creighton, with 20 and 15, and both are gone along with Jamarques Lawrence. But the two best pieces stayed: Pryce Sandfort, the first-team All-Big Ten wing who averaged 18.1 points and shot 42 percent from three, and Braden Frager, the Big Ten’s Sixth Man of the Year, who is expected to start full time. Cale Jacobsen is back too. Keeping a group like that together is its own line item now, and the Big Ten’s NIL market is where a lot of that math gets settled.
Sandfort also landed on the Naismith Trophy late-season team last March, which puts him in the national player-of-the-year conversation going into his final year. RallyFuel’s Naismith NIL power rankings track that race, weighing performance against NIL visibility, social reach, and fan demand, and the board refreshes weekly once games start.
One team learning a new coach, one team returning its two best scorers. Early December is going to tell us a lot about both.
About the Jayskers
You cannot write about this rivalry without addressing the state’s strangest sports habit.
Creighton hasn’t fielded a football team since 1942. So a meaningful chunk of Bluejays basketball fans spend their fall Saturdays deep inside Nebraska’s football fan base, screaming for the Huskers, then switch to blue when the calendar turns. Husker fans coined “Jayskers” for these people, and they did not mean it as a compliment.
It’s genuinely unusual. Back in 2014, a Daily Nebraskan columnist argued that the crossover fanbase disqualifies this from being a real rivalry at all, pointing out that you don’t see North Carolina fans given permission to root for Duke when the Blue Devils are good. He had a point about the permission part, too. Tim Miles, then Nebraska’s coach, publicly shrugged at Omaha natives supporting a strong Creighton team, telling the Lincoln Journal Star that he understood the appeal and that Nebraska’s job was to get good enough to make the question go away.
Twelve years later, that argument feels like a relic. The last decade of results has not looked like two schools being polite to each other. A 29-point loss and a 21-point loss in back-to-back Lincoln trips will burn the friendliness out of anybody’s split allegiance.
Before the basketball: volleyball, Sept. 16, and it’s already gone
The rivalry’s first act of the school year arrives well before December, and if you don’t have a ticket yet, you’re not getting one at face value.
Nebraska hosts Creighton volleyball at Pinnacle Bank Arena on Wednesday, Sept. 16, first serve at 6 p.m., doors at 4:30. It is officially sold out. Two weeks ago there were still a few dozen seats floating around the 300 level. Now there’s nothing but resale.
That’s the part worth sitting with. The Huskers moved this one out of their regular home and into the big downtown building specifically because the in-state match draws, and the building emptied out anyway, three weeks ahead of first serve, on a Wednesday night in September. Nebraska volleyball has been the sport’s biggest draw and one of its biggest NIL stories for a while now, and this is what that looks like on a ticket map.
Nobody sells out a Wednesday for a game they don’t care about. Whatever the Jayskers debate was in 2014, the ticket market settled it.
If you got shut out of a seat, there’s still a way to be part of the night: the players from both programs are listed among RallyFuel’s women’s volleyball athletes.
Mark it down: Creighton vs. Nebraska, Saturday, Dec. 5, CHI Health Center Omaha. Bluejays lead the all-time series 30–29. A Huskers win ties it.
One game. One hundred and three years. Somebody’s getting a number back.
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