Of any major, well-followed American sport, college basketball has the most inconspicuous, anonymous curtain raiser.
Currently, as your author scribes, the national powerhouses of Georgia Southern and Houston are finishing up Division I's first non-exhibition game of the 2008-09 season.
Yet, just the knowledge of games like this year's opener helps to identify the relatively insane college hoops fans that make my favorite sport like a sort of yearly indie rock band that gets a small amount of buzz in late October and early November before exploding to sell out arenas and top the charts in the latter stages of March and early April.
It goes without saying that the buzz is just starting.
You don't have to be one of these huge college hoops fans to know that North Carolina is the prohibitive favorite to take home the title in Detroit on April 6. In fact, it's quite possible that the Tar Heels are even a stronger media and common knowledge favorite this season to win the championship than the Florida team from two years ago that returned all five starters and its sixth man from a championship team
Consider this. UConn, the consensus No. 2 team, lost a first-round game a year ago as a No. 4 seed, has its best player (A.J. Price) coming off of a torn ACL, and its most recognizable player (Hasheem Thabeet) is still fairly offensively challenged.
Given that Price's recovery looks to have been smooth and Thabeet is the premier defensive game-changer and lane-clogger in the country, but the Huskies still have more question marks present than say, UCLA did this time a year ago.
Beyond North Carolina and its predicted domination of its schedule in March and April, the second major national storyline of the new season is the Big East. The national columnists are making the biggest deal out of how the conference could get nine or 10 teams into the NCAA tournament.
The lower rung of the consensus NCAA teams is where the Big East really shows its strength. Marquette, the predicted fifth or sixth placed-team, has its top three guards of Wes Matthews, Dominic James, and Jerel McNeal back for a fourth straight season together.
(As an aside on the Golden Eagles and their new coach, does anybody remember how Buzz Williams basically quit on New Orleans about a year ago when that program on the brink of having nowhere to play? Not saying it means he's a bad guy or a bad coach, just saying.)
Villanova made the Sweet 16 last year, returns almost all of its key players, including junior Scottie Reynolds, but is looked to be a seventh- or eighth-place team.
It's nearly impossible to project this far out, but after the Big East juggernaut, no other BCS conference looks to be nearly as strong. After UNC in the ACC, Miami may well be the second best team, ahead of Duke. Jack McClinton is one of the nation's best players, and probably won't receive the credit he's due unless the Hurricanes finish right behind North Carolina.
Many people out there are high on Wake Forest and its awesome recruiting class that seems slightly reminiscent of Purdue's team a year ago. The sheer inexperience on the roster is reason to be skeptical of some who are making Sweet 16 predictions for the Deamon Deacons.
Speaking of the Boilermakers, they and Michigan State should head the Big Ten, although it wouldn't surprise anyone to see Wisconsin up at the top of the league again. After those three and possibly Ohio State, there's a substantial drop-off to the rest of the league, including what will almost certainly be one of the worst seasons in Indiana history.
Then there's the Big 12, a conference where a case could be made for anyone of three teams to win it, with none of those teams being the defending national champions. One would think that Texas is the class of the league, but Blake Griffin and Oklahoma or Curtis Jerrells and Baylor could have a significant say in the matter.
UCLA will be reliant upon freshmen in shooting guard Jrue Holliday and center J'Mison Morgan to team up with Darren Collison to win the Pac-10. Arizona State really should have been in the NCAAs last year, but is almost certain to get there this year and will be close to UCLA in the standings all year due to the play of all five starters returning, including James Harden and Jeff Pendergraph.
USC looks like a good bet to stay with the top two, but the best conference in the country a year ago has question marks galore all the way down, not the least of which are from Tucson, after Brandon Jennings' departure to Rome and Lute Olson's to retirement.
The dominant side in the SEC should again be Tennessee, but the Vols probably lost too much despite a solid recruiting class to be as good as they were a year ago. Florida should bounce back to be a tournament team, and Kentucky will benefit greatly from a full year of Patrick Patterson. Vanderbilt and then just about all of the West division could be decent teams or merely mediocre to bad.
Davidson is deservedly getting national praise as a top mid-major team after its brilliance last year, and the Wildcats should be back to the tournament, even though Chattanooga is an underrated team in the SoCon. Yet, the importance of point guard Jason Richards from last year's Davidson team cannot be understated, and without him, it's hard to imagine even Stephen Curry going back to the Elite Eight.
The two best non-BCS teams, even including Memphis, might hail from the same league in the West Coast Conference. Gonzaga has everyone back, including Jeremy Pargo, who is one of the nation's best at simply taking over a game. The Zags probably have an even better team this year than the Sweet 16 team three years ago that came within an Adam Morrison river of tears of beating UCLA. Saint Mary's has its three best players back and four of five starters, including Patty Mills, the point guard who made even Chris Paul and Kobe Bryant look silly during the Olympics. And that's not even mentioning the team that won the conference tournament and a first-round NCAA game last year in San Diego, who returns its starting five including Brandon Johnson and Gyno Pomare.
The Missouri Valley likely won't get as much hype due the aberration that was a one-bid league a year ago. But any two of Illinois State, Creighton, Southern Illinois, or Drake should end that. Other mid-majors that are likely to make an impact or grab headlines this season include Siena, Middle Tennessee State, VCU, Tennessee-Martin, and Cal State-Northridge.
I would be remiss if I didn't at least give a mention to the new three-point line. Because after all, college basketball is really nothing more than a three-point contest and the movement of that line back a foot will most assuredly result in about 250 teams shooting about 35% from the floor every game.
In all seriousness, it shouldn't make that much of a difference. In fact, the biggest thing that both the casual and diehard fans will notice is that there will be more room for spacing in teams' offensive sets, which should result in an increase in the quality of play.
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