Know Your Hawkeye Basketball Foes: Omaha

College basketball is enormously popular in Omaha. That's because of Creighton and the city's great downtown venue, CenturyLink Center Omaha.

Creighton had an opening-night crowd of 17,740 Friday night for the Bluejays' 107-61 rout of Alcorn State. Doug McDermott had 20 points in 20 minutes.

The Bluejays are now in the Big East. That will be big-time fun for Omaha's hoops fans.

Oh yeah, there's also Nebraska maha, or Omaha, as it apparently now is calling itself. The Mavericks are in their second season as a Division I program. It paid a price to do so. Or rather, a lot of its former athletes paid a price. The scholarships were honored, but the teams were gutted.

UNO dropped football and wrestling after the 2010-11 school year. The wrestling program had just won its third straight NCAA Division II championship. Why? Because the Summit League extended UNO an invitation. The Mavericks couldn't afford to move up to FCS for football, which they would have had to do to be Division I in basketball and other sports.

The most popular sport at UNO is hockey, not basketball. The Mavericks averaged 4,799 fans for their first four home hockey games this season.

UNO's average men's basketball crowd last season was 1,231.

So here come the Mavericks to Carver-Hawkeye Arena today to play Iowa. UNO was 11-20 last season. It is in the Summit League. It  has taken to simply calling itself Omaha, like fellow league members are now going by Fort Wayne and Kansas City instead of IUPUI-Fort Wayne and Missouri-Kansas City.

Other members of the Summit are North Dakota State, South Dakota State, South Dakota, Western Illinois, IUPUI, and Oakland (Mich.). The Missouri Valley Conference, it ain't.

UNO started its basketball season Friday night with a 68-66 win at Northern Illinois. The Mustangs fought back from a 39-28 halftime deficit. Northern Illinois was 5-25 last season, so this wasn't the win of the year. But it was on the road, and it got done. Northern Illinois led for 38 minutes. Games are 40 minutes long.

Omaha made 27 of its 32 free throws. That's very good. If the Mavericks shoot 32 foul shots today, though, the officials are calling the fouls even tighter than we all feared they would this season.