How Thunder’s Roby finished degree
One week before Isaiah Roby was scheduled to visit Creighton, he got a call from Nebraska. The Cornhuskers staff figured that if Roby was already going to be in Omaha, he might as well add a 60-mile drive to Lincoln as part of his recruiting trip.
Roby, a three-star basketball prospect from Dixon, Illinois, accepted the invitation.
“Nebraska saw me and they offered me on the spot,” Roby told The Oklahoman. “I liked that part about it. They believed in me from the jump. They made it a priority to get me to town, get me to a football game.
“That was a big recruiting tool for us at Nebraska,” he said of Husker game days.
Roby, set to enter his third season with the Thunder, will be in Norman on Saturday to watch his Huskers battle the Sooners in a matchup celebrating the 1971 Game of the Century. A few of his Thunder teammates are tagging along.
Roby knew of the rivalry, but he didn't enroll at Nebraska until 2016, five years after Nebraska left the Big 12 for the Big Ten.
“I kinda had an idea of how big football was in Nebraska before I got there,” Roby said, “but it was even more than I originally had thought.”
Roby spent three years in Lincoln. The 6-foot-8 forward started four games as a freshman and 13 as a sophomore before becoming a full-time starter by his junior year. He averaged 11.8 points and 6.9 rebounds that season.
The Huskers went 53-47 (25-31 Big Ten) in Roby's three seasons — all under coach Tim Miles. The high mark in 2017-18, when Nebraska went 22-11 and 13-5 in the Big Ten. The Huskers were snubbed from the NCAA Tournament, and the program is still looking for its first March Madness win.
Meanwhile, the Nebraska football team went 17-20 during Roby's college career with three straight 3-6 conference records. Roby was there for the last two years of Mike Riley and the first of Scott Frost.
“They may not have won that many games when I was there,” Roby said, “but it was always a good time going to the game.”
Memorial Stadium was like a second home for student-athletes.
“We ate lunch in the football stadium,” said Roby, who played football growing up. “We had our study halls in the football stadium.”
When Roby declared for the 2019 NBA Draft after his junior year, he was still one year away from graduating.
Leaving early paid off. Roby was drafted 45th overall by the Pistons, who traded him to the Mavericks.
Roby was then traded to the Thunder in January of his rookie year, having never played for the Mavericks as he nursed a foot injury. OKC sent center Justin Patton and cash to Dallas. It turned out to be a Thunder win. Roby played just three games in 201920, which made last season feel like his rookie year. He played in 61 games with 34 starts, playing both power forward and center. Roby averaged 8.7 points and 5.6 rebounds per game while shooting 48%.
And he did it while finishing his college degree.
After taking one semester off, Roby had been taking online classes continuously since his rookie season. He credited former Dallas star Michael Finley, now a Mavericks front office executive, for the motivation.
Finley finished his Wisconsin degree in 2014, four years after retiring from the NBA.
“I know you guys got a lot of free time,” Finley told Roby. “Just get it done now and you'll thank yourself later.”
The hardest part for Roby? Reading and doing homework on a plane full of teammates who are cracking jokes and listening to music.
He managed the course load with relative ease, but there was that one night against the Nuggets when he took a ferocious one-two punch on the chin.
“I had a test, and then I had to guard (Nikola) Jokic,” Roby said. “That was a hard day for me.”
Roby somehow survived it, and this summer he graduated from Nebraska with a degree in business management.
He wanted to finish school in part because of his parents, neither of whom went to college. Now he's graduated, his older brother has graduated and his younger brother is in school at West Virginia.
“At some point basketball is gonna stop for everybody,” Roby said. “Hopefully that degree will be a tool I can use.”
He'll go to the game Saturday as a Nebraska alum with an upset on his mind. The Huskers are three-touchdown underdogs, but Roby is optimistic.
“It's a rivalry game,” he said. “Anything can happen in college football.”
Roby tried to make a measured prediction.
“Oh, man, I know Mr. (Clay) Bennett, he's a big OU fan,” Roby said with a nervous laugh.
He paused again, as if considering the consequences of picking against the Thunder chairman, an OU alum. Roby stayed loyal: 38-31 Nebraska. “I'm just hoping for a good game,” he said. “That's all I'm hoping for.”