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Griffin leads No. 12 Nebraska over Vermont, 94-50

Jan 5, 2010 - 3:02 AM BURLINGTON, Vt.(AP) -- Kelsey Griffin scored 25 points and grabbed a career-high 16 rebounds to help undefeated No. 12 Nebraska rout Vermont 94-50 on Monday night.

The victory closed out the non-conference portion of the schedule for the Cornhuskers (13-0), who are off to the best start in program history.

"We very excited about that," said Griffin of the sweep of non-conference games. "We expected it of ourselves. We knew we were going to have some hard, hard coming up on our schedule, but we really tried hard in the off-season to prepare ourselves for the non-conference."

Nebraska begins Big 12 competition at Iowa State on Friday.

"We take it with a grain of salt though because we were by far not perfect," Griffin said. "We have a lot of work to do. What's got us here is being a great practicing team so far, and we're going to continue to do that. We know the Big 12 is a tough league so we're going to have to bring it every night."

Griffin had 17 points in the first half to help Nebraska build a 42-29 lead. She also had nine rebounds by the break. The double-double was her fifth this season and the 25th of her career.

"She's unstoppable, really," Vermont coach Sharon Dawley said. "She'll score on a double team and if you double-team her, she'll make an amazing pass."

Nebraska opened the second half with an 18-4 run to build the lead to 27 and put the game away.

"We came out of the gate and unfortunately didn't handle their pressure very well, so three turnovers for us and then three made field goals for them just kind of took what was a reasonable margin and kind of blew it out of proportion," Dawley said of the early second half.

Kala Kuhlmann scored 13 points, Yvonne Turner had 11 and Cory Montgomery added 10 for Nebraska.

May Kotsopoulos scored 16 points to lead Vermont (11-3), which never led after Turner hit a 3-point field goal for an 8-7 Nebraska lead.

"Vermont's a very good basketball team. They're going to be a force in their league and it happens to be a night where they caught us on a good night," Nebraska coach Connie Yori said. "Not to say that we haven't had other good nights, but this was a pretty good performance on our part. We got things rolling early and we just kept it going."