It's here. Finally. College basketball season.Cincinnati, Xavier and Miami open Saturday. Kentucky already has played — and lost — twice.

        Selection Sunday is 17 weeks away. Yikes! But let's not rush through the season. There is so much to watch, so much to learn.

        Such as:

Sweet scrimmage
        Roll out the ball and let's see a game between (insert Dick Vitale voice here) the absolute best players in America, baby, the PTP-ers.

        How about an all-Atlantic Coast Conference crew of Joseph Forte (North Carolina), Shane Battier (Duke), Terence Morris (Maryland), Juan Dixon (Maryland), Lonny Baxter (Maryland), Jason Williams (Duke) and Brendan Haywood (North Carolina) on one team.

        And Jamaal Tinsley (Iowa State), Loren Woods (Arizona), Jason Gardner (Arizona), Troy Murphy (Notre Dame), Casey Jacobsen (Stanford), Joe Johnson (Arkansas), Jeryl Sasser (SMU) and Jason Kapono (UCLA) on the other.

No place like home
        Utah has won 52 in a row in the Jon Huntsman Center — the best streak in Division I. Who else has it going at home? Try Michigan State (28), Hofstra (26) and Alcorn State (25).

        Last season, Temple ended UC's 42-game home winning streak and LaSalle ended Xavier's 24-game home winning streak.

Remember him?
        Tamir Goodman, proclaimed as the “Jewish Jordan” when as a high school junior he averaged 35.4 points a game for the Talmudical Academy in Baltimore, originally committed to Maryland, then parted ways with the Terps and now finds himself at Towson State in Baltimore. The 6-foot-3 freshman guard averaged 24.6 points and 8.7 assists last season at Takoma Academy in Tacoma Park, Md.

        By the time he's a college senior, it'll feel like he's been around forever — like former Indiana star Damon Bailey.

        Goodman, an Orthodox Jew, will not play on the Sabbath, which works out OK, because Towson has no Friday night or Saturday afternoon games during the regular season. All Saturday home games were rescheduled for 8p.m. — after the sun sets — so Goodman could play.

Fab Five
        OK, none of them goes to Michigan, but here are five college newcomers to watch.

        Perhaps we're being a little provincial, but two freshmen who will raise a few eyebrows are from schools in this area.

        Jason Parker (6-8, F, Kentucky) and Romain Sato (6-4, G-F, Xavier) will have immediate impacts on their teams. Parker, who originally committed to North Carolina but was not accepted after his standardized test score was questioned, is a powerful force who could be one of the Wildcats' top scorers. Sato, from the Central African Republic, comes to Xavier with a lot of hype — and it's deserved. He's going to be good, and he's going to keep improving, because he listens to everything the coaches tell him.

        Looking at some of the traditional powers, expect Chris Duhon (6-1, G, Duke), Zach Randolph (6-9, F-C, Michigan State) and Eddie Griffin (6-9, F, Seton Hall) to help their teams remain in the top 10.

Where am I? Part I
        Some big-name coaches are starting over in new places.

        There will be plenty of scrutiny on North Carolina alum and new coach Matt Doherty, who left Notre Dame after one year as a head coach to take over the storied Tar Heels program. He was perhaps the school's fourth choice. But Doherty inherits a talented team ranked No.6 in the Associated Press preseason poll.

        Mike Brey left Delaware to replace Doherty at Notre Dame and gets the luxury of having the first-team All-American Murphy, a 6-10 junior who did not turn pro so he could play another year for Doherty. Oops.

        Bill Self left Tulsa to take over at Illinois, which lost Lon Kruger to the Atlanta Hawks; Bill Carmody traded Princeton for Northwestern; and good 'ol John Calipari, the former UMass coach, is back in the college game, ready to restore pride to the Memphis program after dabbling in the NBA (two-plus years as New Jersey Nets head coach and one season as Philadelphia 76ers assistant).

        Doherty (sixth), Brey (15th) and Self (eighth) have ranked teams. Calipari might get his group there. As for Carmody, well, he has his work cut out for him.

Where am I? Part II
        These five transfers were big deals coming out of high school and return to the Division I spotlight after sitting out a year or playing junior college ball:

        • Six-foot-10 Michael Bradley, a member of Kentucky's 1998 national championship team, is at Villanova.

        • Two-time all-Big Ten guard Luke Recker left Indiana, stopped in Arizona, survived a serious car crash and has landed at Iowa, where he'll play for former Hoosier Steve Alford.

        • Chris Burgess left Duke after two seasons and will play for Rick Majerus at Utah.

        • Ryan Humphrey switched from Oklahoma to Notre Dame, only to watch the coach (Doherty) he wanted to play for leave for North Carolina.

        • Aaron McGhee left the University of Cincinnati, had a splendid year (26.5 ppg, 9.0 rpg) at Vincennes (Ind.) Junior College and now begins anew at Oklahoma.

Hit hard
        Princeton lost its coach (Carmody) to Northwestern, its leading scorer, Chris Young, to baseball (he was a third-round draft pick of the Pittsburgh Pirates) and its best shooter and No.2 scorer, Spencer Gloger, to UCLA, to whom he had com mitted originally out of high school. Ray Robins, expected to play a big role, is taking a year off of school; he is expected to return next season.

        John Thompson, whose father of the same name is the former Georgetown coach, takes over the program after five years as an assistant with the Tigers. The guys better work that back-door play even better this season.

Hot seat
        Perhaps the most watched coach this season (non-Doherty Division) will be Mike Davis at Indiana. The interim coach, who has taken over for fallen legend Bob Knight, will work to keep the job on a permanent basis while rumors swirl for the next four months over who eventually will take over the program (See Pitino, Rick and Alford, Steve).

        Where did Davis, 40, the 25th coach in the 100-year history of the IU program, come from?

        He had been a Hoosiers assistant for three years. Previously, he was an assistant at Alabama, where he played for four seasons. Smart move, fellas

        These guys did the right thing by changing their minds about the NBA and returning to college: UCLA's Kapono, Providence's Karim Shabazz, UC's Kenny Satterfield, SMU's Sasser and Georgia's D.A. Layne.

West Coast All Stars
        It might be worth it to stay up late a few times this season to catch games from the other side of the United States. There are some awfully good teams and players in the Pacific time zone. The Pac-10 is loaded with four Top 25 teams: Arizona (No.1), Stanford (4), UCLA (17) and Southern Cal (23). And there's always Utah (No.13), from the Mountain West Conference.

Duke it out
        Arizona is ranked No.1 in the Associated Press and USA Today/ESPN polls and the majority of preseason magazines. But if it comes down to the Wildcats and Duke, the consensus No.2, how can you not go with Mike Krzyzewski, whose NCAA Tournament track record is better than Lute Olsen's?

        So, who else do we like? Michigan State will be good but a little young in some key spots. North Carolina has talent, but Doherty is in just his second year as a head coach.

        The 2001 Final Four is in Minneapolis, and this would be a dandy lineup: Duke, Arizona, Maryland and Kansas.

        Watch out for Stanford and Illinois.

        Our emotional pick for the title is Kansas. (How can those players not run through a wall for Roy Williams after he turned down Carolina to stay with his guys?)

        Our fun pick is Seton Hall. With some of the best young talent in the country and one of the nation's hot young coaches in Tommy Amaker, the Pirates could be like Florida, which crashed the Final Four party last March.

        Our bland, rational pick for the NCAA title is Duke.

        Why not?

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