It is the dead period for college basketball. No “official” recruiting. The summer AAU circuit is winding down. So any basketball news is surprising beyond reports of high school kids and where they are leaning.

It is also how you know that your team is either controversial or expected to be good next season (or both). The team keeps getting mentioned in stories or features about the upcoming season.

Jeff Goodman at FoxSports.com posts a little on Pitt’s recently completed Ireland trip. The focus is the NCAA changing the rule to allow freshmen to make the trip. Coach Dixon (obviously) liked the rule change and thinks more teams will take the opportunity. Before, it was only teams with very small freshmen classes taking the trip, simply because there weren’t enough bodies on the roster.

Dixon said this year’s Pitt group will be much bigger and longer than a year ago. Don’t be surprised to see a frontcourt that features much-improved big man Gary McGhee and Zanna – a long and skilled 6-foot-9 native of Nigeria who averaged 8 points and 7 boards on the trip.

“We think he’s going to be pretty good,” Dixon said. “He’s another body so we can play bigger.”

Dixon also has plenty of size on the wing with guys like Gilbert Brown (6-foot-6), Brad Wanamaker (6-4), Patterson (6-5) and freshmen J.J. Moore (6-6) and Cameron Wright (6-5).

This could be Dixon’s deepest team since he took over – although he was cautious.

“Everybody is deep in the summer,” he laughed.

Not in Kansas and Memphis if the NCAA isn’t clearing top-5 players.

Zanna seems to have made rapid strides during his redshirt year. A lot of optimism around him. He made a Rivals.com list of key redshirt freshmen to watch (hat tip to BigGuy).

Although Pittsburgh returns four starters from a team that won 25 games last season, [Lamar] Patterson and [Talib] Zanna still have a chance to work their way into the rotation. Patterson was averaging 10.4 minutes through the first 10 games of the season last year before a severely sprained ankle forced him to take a redshirt. He has plenty of shooting and passing ability. Patterson was ranked 124th in the 2009 recruiting class. The Nigerian-born Zanna can score with either hand and loves to rebound. Zanna delivered a double-double Sunday in the second game of Pittsburgh’s tour of Ireland. Zanna, who moved to the United States in 2006, is fluent in four languages.

Zanna probably has a higher ceiling than Patterson simply because he is a bit rawer. I think there are more expectations for Zanna by fans coming into this season, though. It isn’t because Patterson can’t be good, but because the position where Patterson plays —  forward/guard — is a bit crowded in 2010.

Chris Dokish is back with plenty of good stuff in a Q&A. He is hearing a lot of good things about Steve Adams (“In fact, the college coaches who have seen him play tell me that if he was from the U.S. he would be a top 50 player…”), some of the players Pitt is involved/pursuing, taking a bow on Lamar Patterson over Darnell Dodson, and lots more.

Finally, I found this to be a very interesting general article about college basketball and recruiting for position at the BCS level vs. the mid-major.

Here’s where conventional wisdom breaks down. In reality, players have an offensive responsibility and a defensive responsibility, not just one position. I’m in Las Vegas on the recruiting trail, and already I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone ask if a kid projects as a 2 or a 3, or whether so-and-so can defend the 1.

Take a player like Drake’s recently-graduated Josh Young. He’s lightning-quick and a big-time scorer, but Young was slotted as a tweener. Too small to defend the 2, but also didn’t handle the point on offense. What I’m saying is that we should start understanding that all of the above is OK. Josh Young was a high-major scoring talent who played defense well enough to guard a high-major 1, but he fell through the cracks, so to speak, to the Missouri Valley because those characteristics didn’t slot into a traditional “position.” High-major schools didn’t like him at the 1, and they didn’t like him at the 2. So they didn’t like him.

I did a study on mid-major all-conference players last summer, and I learned a couple things about these high mid-level performers. For a player to become a mid-major all-conference player, he has to be effective enough to be named all-conference, yet for whatever reason he wasn’t snatched up by a high-major. True, there were a couple players who simply chose schools lower on the totem pole, a couple who transferred into smaller schools, and a few who seemingly nobody had ever seen before they arrived on campus. But for almost every other type of player, there was just a disconnect between his “offensive position” and “defensive position.” High-major coaches couldn’t decide what position he’d play, so he fell.

What’s especially odd about this conundrum is that it seems to apply only in the recruiting stage. Once a player’s actually on campus, coaches look past the disconnect.

Coach Dixon’s approach — at least with guards and forwards — is that they can be interchangeable to play the 1 or 2 and the 3 or 4 (and sometimes 5). Like any coach he prefers the natural point guard, but as we saw last year, he is willing to recruit and play guards that don’t actually project as point guards at the spot. He has always insisted that forwards be versatile enough to play “out of position.” Whether it is to guard someone else on the defensive end, or to be able to overcome injuries.