After a rough outing in Iowa City for Ohio State women’s basketball on Jan. 25, 2026, the Buckeyes got back to winning ways over the last week. After a win over the Wisconsin Badgers, the Scarlet and Gray welcomed the Nebraska Cornhuskers in a game that was at times not close and at other times a nail biter for Buckeye fans.
It was a blockbuster matchup between sophomore point guards Jaloni Cambridge and Big Red’s Britt Prince, a rare fast start and a game that showed signs of a Buckeye team taking their foot off the gas. Here are three lessons from the victory before Ohio State travels west.
No time off
With just under four minutes left in the third quarter, the Buckeyes were cruising. Guard Kennedy Cambridge went to the bench for rest as the crowd applauded the redshirt junior’s hustle all game, as she helped Ohio State amass a 20-point lead over the recently ranked Cornhuskers. It was at that moment that Nebraska turned the game on its head.
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The Cornhuskers scored 12 of the last 14 points of the quarter, while they out rebounded the Buckeyes 6-2 during the same stretch. Nebraska still went into the fourth quarter with a 10-point deficit, but the visitors from Lincoln had all the momentum.
“We got very lackadaisical defensively. We didn’t rebound. They got two rebounds off of free throws, which is inexcusable,” head coach Kevin McGuff told reporters. “We didn’t get any loose balls. They were getting all the 50/50 balls. And so, really just would use the word complacency set in, and we allowed it to.”
Ohio State won by 19 points, but had to duplicate the same work that got them to the 20-point third quarter lead in the first place. It showed that the Buckeyes have what it takes to beat teams lower than them in the conference standings comfortably, but the team is nowhere close to being able to phone in performances.
In the fourth quarter, the Cornhuskers called an early timeout in the middle of a scrum on the floor. Ohio State tried to get ahold of the ball with a Nebraska player but head coach Amy Williams got a timeout in before the Buckeyes could turn the possession. It was during that timeout that point guard Jaloni Cambridge rallied the team, and told the Buckeyes to take it to the Cornhuskers, which they did — especially Cambridge.
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Jaloni Cambridge scored the first 11 points of the quarter and the guard outscored Nebraska 9-6 by herself in the less than two minutes of game time that followed that Cornhusker timeout. The final two points, which came from the free throw line, began an 11-point run and 17 of the last 20 points scored.
Ohio State’s sophomore leader Cambridge scored 30 points in the victory, making her the first player since Jacy Sheldon during the 2021-22 season to have at least four 30-point games in a single campaign.
Nebraska shot 4-for-11 since that Williams timeout, which showed that once the complacency left, the Buckeyes made life difficult for the opposition. In the second half, Ohio State had 21 of its 33 points off turnovers, 15 in the third, when the initial lead built, and six in the final period to cement the victory.
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When the Buckeyes are at their best, they are getting turning extra possessions into points.
“We practice that all day,” Kennedy Cambridge told reporters. “We do this thing called ODO, like, offense, defense, offense. And if you get a steal, instead of going all the way down, McGuff’s going to let you in. And if you get that steal, you get rewarded. So I mean, we’re just playing tough on the one end. And then offense comes naturally.”
Starting quickly
Before Sunday, Ohio State had its fair share of trouble at the start of games. The Buckeyes entered the second quarter of eight of their 10 Big Ten matchups with a deficit.
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While the slow starts did not hurt Ohio State necessarily with eight wins in those 10 games, against tougher sides it buries the team in a difficult to get out of hole (see games against Iowa and UCLA).
That was not a problem on Sunday. The Scarlet and Gray scored the first five points of the game went 4-for-6 to start. McGuff’s side answered every Nebraska basket and took a six-point lead into the second quarter. What made the start more impressive was the absence of Jaloni Cambridge for seven of the quarter’s 10 minutes, due to two early fouls.
Guard Chance Gray led the team with eight of her 21 points on the night and it was Ohio State putting teams in a hole, instead of trying to climb out of its own.
“I thought our focus and our energy was good to start the game, and especially defensively,” McGuff said. “And I think that our slow starts have usually been more just a lack of awareness of what we’re trying to accomplish on the defensive end. I thought we had that today, and so it allowed for a better start.”
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The Buckeyes already try to speed teams up but making the other team have to also comeback while trying to slow the game down showed Ohio State’s ability to hurt teams. Nebraska had seven of its 25 turnovers in the first quarter, a Big Ten single game high for the Buckeyes this season.
Ohio State’s start goes back to the idea of complacency. Most of those deficits came against teams below the Buckeyes in the Big Ten standings, while matchup issues inside hurt Ohio State against both the Iowa Hawkeyes and UCLA Bruins.
So, six of those eight first quarter deficits came against teams that the Buckeyes eventually defeated by 15 points on average.
How the Buckeyes defended Nebraska’s best player showed that sticking to the game plan worked.
Defending Prince
Last season, the Jaloni Cambridge matchup against Nebraska point guard Britt Prince ended with a combined eight points from the duo, and every single one of them came from Prince.
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The 25-26 edition of the matchup had more fireworks, but this time it was Prince who had the quiet night. Now, it was not zero points quiet, but Prince entered Sunday with an 18.4 scoring average. Ohio State held Prince to 12 points on 4-for-13 shooting, the second worst efficiency for the sophomore in a game this season.
Prince is known for similar play to Jaloni Cambridge. She attacks the basket with frequency or can hurt a team from beyond the arc, but against the Buckeyes there was usually somebody to get in her way.
“We had a lot of lot of conversation about Britt Prince because she’s such a great player, and I think one of the best guards, and not only our league but the country,” McGuff said. “We were trying to just devise some ways to kind of slow her down a little bit, because she can generate so much offense. And so I think we executed that pretty well.”
In the first quarter, Prince scored half of those points but stayed relatively quiet for the remaining 30 minutes of the game. The one area that the guard hurt Ohio State was her six assists, with four going to a forward. Nebraska did do a good job of exploiting the absence of Buckeye redshirt forward Kylee Kitts.
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With either center Elsa Lemmilä or Ella Hobbs on the court at any given moment, Prince and the Cornhuskers did well to bait whichever big was on the court and then pass inside to an open forward. It was a problem that Iowa exploited with their two interior stars but the Cornhuskers did not have the personnel to do it.
Forward Amiah Hargrove was tough to stop in Williams’ strategy. The sophomore had 24 points, and six of them came from beyond the arc. However, in the give and take of trying to defend five players, Ohio State’s ability to suppress Prince was enough to stop Nebraska from pulling off the upset.
