OKLAHOMA CITY—The joy is radiating off of Braden Frager as a fan grabs his head and Frager keeps it pushing to embrace the mob of Nebraska fans that are all but pushed up on the black railing in the first row of the end zone at The PayCom Center.
In any other circumstance, the fan grabbing Frager and violating his personal space without having any sort of prior relationship with him would be considered stepping over the line. Here, though, Frager and that fan aren’t strangers. Frager and the sea of other fans wearing red aren’t, either.
Frager–a Lincoln, Nebraska, native–is one of them, and he’s celebrating like one of them.
The difference, though, is that Frager changed the feel of this night for every Nebraska fan in the building. Oklahoma City’s canal being invaded by a number of Nebraska fans late that Saturday night wouldn’t have been possible without Frager. Neither would the postgame parade that he was participating in after Nebraska’s Round of 32 win over Vanderbilt.
Comparing the parade to a dream may not be a strong enough descriptor for what the Nebraska forward was going through at the time. While Frager passed the crowd, a pre-teen filmed him from the stands with his jaw dropping at his presence. An adult down the row didn’t want a video of Frager or a high five, all he chose to do was embrace delirium while Frager walked by.
Frager could’ve gone plenty of places to become a highly-compensated, well known college basketball player. This was the only place that provided the opportunity for him to be a celebrity, though.
“I always knew I wanted to play for them,” Frager told Basket Under Review. “It's unbelievable, not only to just be playing for the team that I watched, but just to be even in the position that I am, playing Division-I basketball. It's just surreal to even do it in front of my friends and family all at home. I mean, I got friends, family, girlfriend all at home watching me. So it's just amazing. They can go out their back door and watch me play every night.”
Frager continues down the line to slap hands with Nebraska fans of all ages as if he’s their version of Justin Bieber. These are Frager’s people, this is the program that he’s always dreamed of playing for and this is the type of moment he had the foresight to envision happening one day.
The Nebraska forward had just streaked down the lane and laid it in to deliver Nebraska basketball with one of its best moments in program history and to send it to the Sweet 16 for the first time ever. It was the cherry on top of Frager’s 15-point performance and immortalized him forever within this program’s history.
That moment was unforgettable in itself considering this program’s history, and it’s all that more memorable considering who was at the center of it. In Nebraska’s love story with Frager, this was representative of the wedding.
“The city loves him,” Nebraska guard Connor Essegian told Basket Under Review. “He’s a hometown kid. The way that Lincoln supports us, they support their hometown kids even more.”
“A little bit of buzz” planted in the ear of Nebraska assistant Nate Loenser, a few tips and a 15-minute drive from Pinnacle Bank Arena to Frager’s Lincoln Southwest High School made this marriage one that would make too much sense to avoid considering. After the initial evaluation on Frager, Nebraska’s staff knew that it wasn’t going to do that.
Virgilio says that Loenser and Hoiberg always saw something special in Frager and pursued him aggressively as a result. Hoiberg and Loenser aren’t ones to sugarcoat much, though. They told Frager on the front end that he may be in for a redshirt year based on the roster composition that they projected to have.
Frager committed anyway, though.
The now-Nebraska standout went through the process and took visits elsewhere. He always came back to this program, though. He believed in it. He believed in Hoiberg. He believed in the community and what being a part of it could mean for him moving forward.
Nebraska’s staff says they saw something special out of Frager in his first summer on their campus–even through an injury that hampered him–but the veterans in front of him weren’t budging. Frager says the conversation with Hoiberg in which he learned he wouldn’t be in the rotation was difficult, but he eventually got to the point where he accepted his reality. The Nebraska freshman was going to spend the season on the end of the bench wearing street clothes, and whether that changed wasn’t up to him.
“I can only imagine how tough that’s got to be,” Essegian said. “He's a dude who definitely could have played and gave us good minutes last year. The way that he carried himself and allowed himself to stay in the moment last year and the way that he was able to grow and be around the program and understand the situations and the culture and the system. It helped him out tremendously.”
A BIG 10 sixth-man of the year award, All-BIG 10 Freshman Team selection and rotation spot on the best team in Nebraska history later, and it appears as if Frager’s year away benefitted him. Essegian describes Frager’s first season on the floor as his blossoming. The injured Nebraska guard is of the belief that this could’ve happened a season ago, too. He wasn’t the only one.
Hoiberg told Frager to be ready in the initial meeting that informed him he was on track to be benefitted by a redshirt year and meant it. Nebraska’s depth withered away by the early third of conference play and it had lost a few in a row. Internally, the conversations regarding pulling Frager’s redshirt and using him down the stretch amplified.
Frager seeing the floor in 2024-25 ultimately didn’t come to fruition, but the conversations regarding his status were perhaps the biggest indicator in regard to how he used the year. Virgilio says Frager was great in practice and was doing things that nobody else on the roster was. The energy and pop that showed up in front of 14,887 fans at PayCom Arena were present in those days, too.
“[He] just did a great job of taking advantage of his redshirt year,” Loenser said. “He’s done a great job of raising his floor. He’s still got areas to grow, and he’s working on it and we’ll just kind of see where the trajectory goes from there.”
Frager’s individual trajectory and how this all ends for him individually is yet to be seen. He’s changed the course of Nebraska’s season, though. Bigger than Frager himself is what his development says about this program.
While other programs have chased the accumulation of the most talented players they can find, Nebraska’s staff has played the long game with players it believes in, prioritized fit as well as character and has went hard after areas in which it knows it can make up ground on the nation’s elite. Frager is the rare power-five redshirt and increased Nebraska’s NCAA Tournament window as a result.
If there was any doubt as to whether Nebraska made the right decision by avoiding pulling Frager’s redshirt, he’s ready to shut that down definitively.
“I'm glad that they didn't, I'm just glad it worked out how it did,” Frager said. “It felt like the longest year of my life, but I'm so glad I just got to see everything. I got to see everything firsthand. I got to grow, not only as a person, physically, mentally, everything, just be around these coaches for a whole year before I could actually go out there and do what I'm doing this year.”
Every other game that Frager played in until his freshman season of high school included him picking up a technical foul, he says. Frager had an undeniable passion for basketball and felt as if his passion was essential to his ability to impact games.
He knew something had to change, though.
“I realized I’m probably not going to get recruited a whole lot if I’m labeled as a crash out,” Frager said. “I finally grew up.”
These days, Frager says, he’s “simmered down” and has found the happy medium in regard to how much energy and intensity he can play with. The chest bumps, yelling and high general intensity level are still present within Frager’s game, but the technical fouls aren’t as common.
Frager did pick up a technical in Nebraska’s win over Michigan State, but Nebraska general manager Luca Virgilio says Frager has matured over the course of this ride. Nebraska’s veterans engaged Frager throughout the days following that Michigan State game in an effort to use that technical as a teaching moment. It appears as if it’s worked
The Nebraska staff noticed that the game in which Frager best handled his emotions was the Huskers’ win over Troy in the Round of 64, and they’re looking to build on that.
Nebraska coach Fred Hoiberg and company would never want Frager to do anything but run down the floor embracing the moment and chest bumping Nebraska guard Jamarques Lawrence after putting Nebraska up late against Vanderbilt. That’s who Frager is, and who Nebraska is allowing him to be.
“He’s very passionate,” Virgilio told Basket Under Review. “He's a guy that is going to be emotional for the right reasons and what we have been trying to do as a staff is to help him channel that energy the right way. And I think he's making a lot of progress.”
The restless waiting had been bottled up long enough as Frager ran to the scorers table at Pinnacle Bank Arena to check into Nebraska’s nationally-anticipated matchup with Illinois. Frager had been out for around 10 days with an ankle sprain and his return was perhaps the storyline of the day.
If it wasn’t, it was at least the moment that excited Nebraska’s rabid fanbase the most that day.
“The crowd pop,” Essegian said, “It was ridiculous.”
Frager is getting the star treatment that his childhood favorite players Terran Pettaway and Gylnn Watson Jr. once got while he and his dad were in the stands watching. The Nebraska forward isn’t quite a full-blown star yet–and likely has to take a step from averaging 11.7 points and 3.8 rebounds a game in order to do that–but he’s a focal point on Nebraska’s best team in program history.
Nebraska has players that are more directly tied to its success, but it has no more energetic player than Frager. Watching Frager dive on the floor for rebounds, let out a yell after a dunk and change the dynamic of the game through mere intensity in Nebraska’s win over Vanderbilt was watching the version of the redshirt freshman that this group always knew was in there.
“We love an aggressive Frager,” Nebraska guard Cale Jacobsen told Basket Under Review. “When he’s at his best, it’s when our team can kind of go to the next level.”
When Frager is in double figures, Nebraska is 18-1 this season. When he’s not, it’s just 10-5. Frager has been in double figures and has changed the momentum of games with big baskets down the stretch of each.
Frager has quickly become priority No. 1 in terms of Nebraska’s retention plan for 2026-27 as a result of the way he’s changed the dynamic of this Nebraska team. The Nebraska freshman is No. 47 in the country in two-point efficiency and is shooting 68.1% from inside the arc. He’s also a threat to make a momentum-shifting shot from 3-point range as a 33.8% shooter.
What’s more pertinent than any of Frager’s numbers at this stage is the general sense of fearlessness he approaches all of it with. Frager has run up on a number of talented, veteran bigs at this level and has had to deal with all they present. They’ve had to guard him, too, though.
And that hasn’t been an easy task.
“He's just continued to mature and grow up,” Jacobsen said. “That's kind of been the coolest part about this whole thing in the last two years is the way that he's just grown into being who he is now.”
