On Friday afternoon, Nebraska men’s basketball coach Fred Hoiberg publicly addressed a viral video that showed him swiping at an Iowa fan’s phone after the Hawkeyes’ 57-52 win over the No. 9 Cornhuskers on Tuesday.
In the video, Hoiberg goes through the postgame handshake line and is interrputed by an Iowa fan. The fan, who has not been identified, ran up to him while recording on his cell phone and yelled, “Nice game, buddy!” The head coach then swiped at the phone, grabbed an Iowa assistant coach, and pointed out the student to him.
“I was going through the handshake line congratulating the Iowa coaches on a hard-fought win, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, this kid rushes up on me, and I reacted to it,” Hoiberg said during Nebraska’s media availability Friday afternoon. “And I think anybody in my position after a game like that would have reacted in a similar way.”
Hoiberg, 53, was born with an abnormal aortic valve and underwent two open-heart surgeries in 2005 and 2015, one to treat an aortic root aneurysm and the second to replace the valve. He wears a pacemaker, recently replaced in 2024, and explained how cell phones can potentially disrupt the medical device, and that he won’t survive if something happens to it. He also acknowledged his emotions were running high from the game.
In terms of the Iowa assistant coach, Hoiberg didn’t say which assistant it was that he grabbed, but that he got his number from a fellow Iowa staffer and apologized, to which the Iowa assistant responded, “‘I would have done the same thing.'”
“I think for everybody, with court storms, there’s been a lot of different things that have happened over the years, unfortunate things,” Hoiberg said. “I’m not against court storms. I think it’s great to be able to go out and celebrate with your team. But you can’t go into the handshake line and put players and coaches in danger.”
“That stuff should never happen,” he added.
Hours before Hoiberg’s statement, Iowa head coach Ben McCollum was asked about his thoughts on the incident during media availability Friday morning, to which he supported the idea of court storms but reasoned with the Nebraska head coach’s reaction.
“[Court storming] allows you to engage with your fans on a little more personal level,” McCollum said. “I think anytime you do that, you want to do it with some safety measures and whatnot.”
McCollum said he didn’t pay attention to Iowa’s security measures at the time, but acknowledged that as the winning coach, his perspective will be biased. The Hawkeye head coach was on the other side of a court storm when Iowa lost to Minnesota back in January.
“We had some people in our face at Minnesota, but that was right in his face. I am not in that situation, so I don’t have a clue what I would have done,” he said.
McCollum, in his debut coaching season in the Big Ten, said that while he doesn’t know Hoiberg very well, but called the Nebraska head coach “classy and calm.”
The University of Iowa Athletics Department also released a statement on Wednesday in the wake of the incident, saying the individual put Nebraska team members “in a reactive situation.”
“We apologize for this incident and will conduct a review of our procedures and security measures to determine what adjustments may need to be made to further strengthen our protocols and help prevent similar incidents in the future,” the statement read.
Big Ten officials also released a statement Wednesday, saying they will not be taking any disciplinary action against Hoiberg and appreciated Iowa Athletics’ statement on its security protocols.