Cognitive radio (CR) and multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) are two independent physical layer technologies that have made significant impact on wireless networking. CR operates on the channel/band level to exploit white space across spectrum dimension while MIMO operates within the same channel to improve spectral efficiency within the same band. In this paper, we explore MIMO-empowered CR network, which we call {\rm CRN}^{{\rm MIMO}}, to achieve the ultimate flexibility and efficiency in dynamic spectrum access and spectrum utilization. Given that CR and MIMO handle interference at different levels (across channels vs. within a channel), we are interested in how to jointly optimize both so as to maximize user throughput in a multihop network. To answer this question, we develop a tractable mathematical model for {\rm CRN}^{{\rm MIMO}}, which captures the essence of channel assignment (for CR) and degree-of-freedom (DoF) allocation (for MIMO) within a channel. Based on this mathematical model, we use numerical results to show how channel assignment in CRN and DoF allocation in MIMO can be jointly optimized to maximize throughput. More important, for a {\rm CRN}^{{\rm MIMO}} with A_{{\rm MIMO}} antennas at each node, we show that joint optimization of CR and MIMO offers more than A_{MIMO}-fold throughput increase than a CRN (without MIMO).