In celebration of eating popcorn out of garbage cans in Omaha

Good morning, and thanks for your continued support of Extra Points.

One of the really difficult things about writing this newsletter is figuring out exactly what stories I want to talk about. There’s just so much happening every single day, from new legal challenges to House, to the White House maybe setting higher education funding on fire, to the AFCA’s lobbying efforts, potential changes to the CFP, and much, much more.

These are all complicated topics that deserve additional reporting, nuance and careful analysis, just like all the very serious other stories in the college sports industry.

So today, I’m not going to write about those.

I’m going to write about something, and I mean this in the absolute most loving way possible, that is very stupid.

Let’s talk about Nebraska-Omaha. And garbage cans.

The Omaha Mavericks men’s basketball program has not been a historically successful D-I program. The team has never made the NCAA Tournament, hasn’t won 20 games since 2019, and has finished with a winning conference record just four times.

This year wasn’t supposed to be any different. The Mavericks escaped last place in the preseason Summit League poll by a single vote, and the team opened the season with a 4-9 record.

But then a funny thing happened. The team simply decided to not lose any more games.

Now, as the calendar is about to flip to February, the Mavs have won nine games in a row, and sit at the top of the Summit League standings, a game up on St. Thomas.

So, if you’re the school, you figure now is the time to really engage this fanbase. Now is when you need to pack the gym, secure a meaningful home-court advantage, and find a way to scratch and crawl to the postseason. Whatever you can do to get more butts in those seats, by God, now is the time to do it.

And that’s exactly what Omaha is doing. With trash cans.

I’m not going to sit here and lie to you and say I’ve watched a lot of Omaha men’s basketball this season on TV. I have not. So let me defer to the language in the press release here for a second:

This is true. Local TV even did a segment on it recently, if you want to see a clip of Coach Brown demolishing an unsuspecting trash can (even taking a belt to the poor thing), just click here.

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