FanHouse Pac 10 Basketball

Nikki Caldwell gets to go home for the holiday, so from that perspective, this trip is already a success.

The UCLA coach, in her second season in Westwood, is bringing her team to Knoxville to take on her mentor, Pat Summitt, and the sixth-ranked Tennessee Lady Vols on Saturday.

It's a chance for Caldwell, the Oak Ridge, Tenn., native, to come back as a local girl made good, and to eat Aunt Janice's dressing.

"There are some good soul food places in L.A., but I'm looking forward to the home cooking," Caldwell said.

Two weeks ago, Pat Summitt surveyed the national scene and said this:

"A lot of people don't have Mississippi State on their radar screen and they should."

Never argue with Pat.

Mississippi State is climbing the rankings -- moving from No. 25 to No. 19 in this week's poll -- and the ladder of national recognition, particularly after Sunday's 84-55 win over No. 20 Maryland.

Granted, Maryland is remodeling after the graduation of Kristi Tolliver and Marisa Coleman and the transfer of Marah Strickland, and Brenda Frese's program will likely struggle with change most of the year, but the Bulldogs took it to the Terrapins on their home floor.

Change doesn't always come quickly.

For example, when everyone says that Baylor freshman Brittney Griner will change women's basketball. Well, sure, she will.

But did we all expect it to happen in the first couple of weeks?

In the first three games of her college career, she has tried to dunk twice and missed both. Sunday at No. 17 Cal in Berkeley, Calif., Griner had an opportunity in the closing moments of a 69-49 victory. Baylor had the ball in transition and guard Melissa Jones passed the ball to Griner behind her back at the baseline. Griner went up with her right hand to dunk and the ball bounced off the rim. She pulled down the rebound and was fouled.

When Connecticut ran through the 2008-09 season with a 39-0 record and cruised through the Final Four to a national title, they turned an entire season, thousands of games involving hundreds of teams, into an exercise in inevitability.

At the cusp of a new college season, the biggest question is: Can the Huskies do that again? Or will the search for a new point guard to replace Renee Montgomery will bring UConn back to the pack?

Connecticut is the undisputed No. 1 team in the nation at its start, the unanimous choice in both national polls. But, of course. The Huskies have Maya Moore and Tina Charles, two of the top three or four players in the country, they have outstanding role players such as Kalnna Greene and Kaili McLaren. They have Geno Auriemma, who embraces the role of front-runner in a big, enthusiastic bear hug.

Tara VanDerveer, right, has been coaching for nearly 30 years. She doesn't think she's recruited siblings before. So as new experiences go, it's worked out pretty well.

Chiney Ogwumike, a 6-foot-3 forward from Texas and the No. 1-rated recruit in the country, signed her national letter of intent to play at Stanford on Thursday. Chiney will join her older sister Nneka, who is a sophomore forward for the No. 2-ranked Cardinal. Ogwumike chose Stanford over Connecticut and Notre Dame.

Kay Yow is still very much a presence in the North Carolina State women's basketball program.

Her name is on the athletic department's Wall of Fame, and on the basketball court at Reynolds Coliseum. Her photo still hangs in the women's basketball locker room.

"She was North Carolina State basketball, and you don't and you can't wipe that away with a new staff," said new N.C. State head coach Kellie Jolly Harper.

For most of this decade, the Pac-10 was UCLA and the rest. The Bruins have been the Pac-10's representation in the Final Four three of the four times the league has placed a team on the final weekend since 2000, failing to claim the championship each time, but pulling themselves ahead of the West Coast pack as the elite program.

That all changed last season, when Washington won the Pac-10 regular season and head coach Lorenzo Romar was named conference coach of the year. Now, his team returns as a favorite to win in the conference, and Romar knows it.

"Our team this year has the benefit of having some players that were on our team last year that won a Pac-10 Championship and that certainly helps us," Romar said. "I think we have the fastest team since 2005 when we had Nate Robinson," Romar said.

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Part of the beauty of college basketball is that it isn't like college football. The top teams don't have to be afraid of playing a tough opponent; worried that risking a single loss would derail a season's worth of effort.

Instead, the best teams in college basketball want to cut their teeth on one another, learn from their shortcomings, shore up before spring, or build a resume for the NCAA committee by collecting wins against stiff competition.

The following is a list of the top five schedules in women's college basketball this season. These teams are going to do it the hard way. And you gotta admire that.

Joanne Boyle came to Cal four years ago as the head coach, inheriting a team built on freshmen talent.

And here she is again, in a gym full of young, inexperienced players, not entirely sure what she has or how they will perform when games begin in two weeks.

"It's going to be an interesting season," Boyle said. "I think we're going to be good. I'm just not sure when."

Boyle has taken the Bears from a struggling program to one that has cemented itself among the national elite -- a regular member of the rankings, an NCAA participant, a player in the Pac-10.

Having lost eight of 10 games to Gonzaga between 1997 and 2006, the Washington Huskies felt they needed a break because "the schedule began to get away from us." Apparently, that was code for "tired of being beaten by an in-state team from a non-power conference."

Well, after a few years of finding themselves, Washington would like to renew the series with Gonzaga. Just as long as the games are played for Washington's benefit.

Rather than play a home-and-home type of series with Gonzaga as had been done (and how Gonzaga plays it with Washington State, Wake Forest, Illinois, and Michigan State), Washington wants a three game series to be played at Key Arena in Seattle as a neutral site contest. Apparently playing a scant five miles from Washington's campus still constitutes a "neutral" site to Washington's athletic department as long as the ticket sales are split 50-50.