IOWA CITY, Iowa —

The fans at Carver-Hawkeye Arena rose to their feet and erupted into a deafening roar at halftime of Saturday’s game.

Their applause had nothing to do with basketball.

Iowa quarterback Drew Tate sauntered onto center court to meet his teammates as 12,000 people bellowed “Drewwwww.” Receiver Warren Holloway, the hero of Iowa’s Capital One Bowl fairytale win, lugged the Hawkeyes’ trophy to center court. Footage of his game-winning touchdown as time expired rolled on the Jumbotron at the top of the arena.

That’s what the fans wanted to see, not a basketball game in which turnovers seemed more common than baskets. Not even an 18-2 Iowa run to end the first half could inject the same enthusiasm.

In a basketball arena in the middle of basketball season, the sport still bowed to football.

And I felt right at home.

Here at NU, there isn’t the same excitement about basketball as there is about football, either. Nobody tailgates for basketball and there’s no signing day bonanza like in football.

Basketball’s just not as big of a deal and it won’t be until NU’s program offers a reason for it to be put on that kind of pedestal.

There was a buzz around the basketball team at the beginning of the season, and it’s now died down to a dull hum. We’ve beaten the “what’s wrong with this team?” horse to death, and even coach Bill Carmody can’t figure it out, but it doesn’t take a genius to figure out what the result has been.

NU basketball has kept itself subordinate to NU football.

Would an NCAA Tournament berth change things? Probably. For now it’s hard to get excited about a program whose shining moment came six years ago when it went to the National Invitational Tournament.

Since when is that success?

I once told a friend of mine who goes to UCLA that NU’s basketball team has never been to the NCAA Tournament. The statement didn’t really register; she stared at me blankly and repeated the word never.

I guess it’s a hard scenario to get when your arena has 11 National Championship banners hanging from the rafters. Out there failure is a year without an NCAA Tournament bid.

I know it takes many small steps to build a winning program, but the NIT appearance didn’t lead to more. This season, every step forward is counteracted by problems. There has to be a magical season that can lure recruits and excite alumni.

The football team’s last season was far from magical, but they’ve had magic recently. There was the 1995 campaign leading to the Rose Bowl and the 2000 Big Ten championship. Not to mention, no NU basketball player has recently graced the cover of Sports Illustrated.

The momentary excitement the Cats created last year by beating Illinois, Wisconsin and then-respectable Purdue, faded away at the end of the season when non-conference losses came back to haunt them.

This year the postseason is still within the Cats’ grasp. They have four winnable games against Texas A&M-Corpus Christi, Penn State, Michigan and Indiana. Even if they pull that off, they’ll only be .500, and Northwestern is the only Big Ten team in the last 20 years to have finished .500 and been denied an NIT berth.

And even if they get in, will it be enough?

I have a better question.

How many days until kickoff?

Deputy Sports Editor Tania Ganguli is a Weinberg junior. She can be reached at [email protected].