ACC

Unlike the NBA, where most starting lineups are set in stone weeks before the season, NCAA starting fives are highly unsettled and constantly in flux. Going through the BCS leagues this week, I'll be projecting the starting fives for each team. Also included is the team's most important bench option, and some notes on other possible lineups.

Another season of ACC football is on the horizon, and the nagging question

In recent weeks, the Rise & Fall series has chronicled the progress (or regress) of college basketball's major conference teams. But if I equated each team to a civilization, I was mistaken. It is really the NCAA conference that equates to a burgeoning civilization or nation, each with its sometimes stable and sometimes rotating member states. Like civilizations, the prestige and power of conferences wax and wane..

People have been emailing me this week asking how I came up with the groupings for the Conference Rise & Fall articles. While the groupings I used were based on a mix of intuition and stats, here are the actual conference RPI's over the last decade. Notice the clean split between certain league divisions.. for example, the BCS leagues and non-BCS leagues. The difference in avg RPI between the best and worst BCS leagues (ACC & Pac-10) is 2.7, which is almost as big as the gap between the Pac-10 and the closest non-BCS league.

Like civilizations, all great basketball programs eventually fall.. replaced by an upstart newcomer. In this week's Rise & Fall series, we'll take a look at which BCS programs are rising, falling, or merely treading water.

ACC

We'll be rolling out our annual 144 Teams in 144 Days preview in just a couple weeks.. so it seemed like a good time to throw out my offseason Top 50 picks. With Draft entries settled, we have a clearer look at what is already shaping up to be another wild and exciting season of college basketball!

36 teams will feature at least one McDonald's All-American next year.  Some programs like Duke feature a starting five full of high school superstars, while others like Rutgers and FSU are welcoming their first Big Mac Maestros.  Here are projected starting lineups for all 36 teams with an All-American.