It’s mid-October and you know what that means

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Today marks the “official” start of practice for the 2011-12 college basketball season.

But “practice” – albeit much more limited in scope than what commences today – has been going on since players showed up on campus for the start of classes in August and September, via the “individual” and group workouts conducted by coaches at NCAA-affiliated programs across the country.

All the hoopla you’ll see – in person or on television – this evening has never caught my fancy.

I’m not interested in watching coaches and players wearing funny “theme-oriented” garb or dancing or singing.

Dunk contests bore me. “Real” dunks – the type guys throw down, in traffic and over the top of defenders, in “real” games – excite me.

The brief “scrimmages” on tap tonight aren’t going to tell a coach a lot about how good – or mediocre – his team might be in December, much less as it prepares for conference tournament play in March.

The practices that begin on Saturday, mostly behind closed doors and without any of the media- and athletic department marketing department-driven fanfare and goofiness, will do the trick, though.

The first “real” games are set for Nov. 7 – three weeks from Monday.

Of course, the opening contest that will really signal the start of the season is the one that will be played four days later – on the deck of the USS Carl Vinson in San Diego – between the teams representing proverbial “aircraft carrier programs” North Carolina and Michigan State.

How will the salt water breeze affect the jump shots from the likes of Harrison Barnes and Draymon Green?

Well, that’s one of the things that we’ll discover before the season culminates with – shockingly enough – the Final Four Weekend, in New Orleans for the first time in nine years.

Other things I’m curious to discover before the March 31 championship semifinals are played in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome (wow! Do you think we’ll see a few Mercedes-Benz ads during the tournament?):

• Could we watch a Final Four with players that may comprise from nine to 11 of the 14 “lottery” selections in the 2012 NBA Draft? That will be the case if the North Carolina, Kentucky, Connecticut and Ohio State teams are in New Orleans. And that’s the safest Final Four projection anyone can make in October.
• This is going to be the most intriguing race for National Freshman of the Year honors since, say, the 2007-8 season, when Michael Beasley of Kansas State nabbed the honors over the likes of Derrick Rose of Memphis, Kevin Love of UCLA and O.J. Mayo of USC? Anthony Davis and Michael Kidd-Gilchrist (Kentucky), Austin Rivers (Duke) and Bradley Beal (Florida) were the consensus four-best freshmen for this season until Andre Drummond despite to bypass a year at prep school and enroll at Connecticut. As for those dunks that do excite me? Drummond is going to get a bunch of those this season.
•  Pittsburgh and Syracuse – and, maybe, Connecticut – are bound for the Atlantic Coast Conference. Will this be the final season in which the Big East is convincingly the deepest – if not quite unarguably the flat-out best – conference in the sport? It would be hard to suggest otherwise. But that depth will yield eight to 10 of the tournament’s 68 participants come March 11.
•   After consecutive appearances in national title games, what’s in store for Coach Brad Stevens and his Butler program this season? With Sheldon Mack and Matt Howard no longer in uniform, seeing the current Bulldogs in uniform on March 31 would be something beyond startling. But don’t think for an instant that Stevens is done putting teams together capable of challenging for accomplishments well beyond Horizon League championships. What Stevens and Butler did the past two springs ranks with the greatest team accomplishments in the sport’s history – including all of the stuff that those UCLA, Duke and Kentucky teams did.