A few basketball items to put out there before football becomes the primary.

Lists. Lists. Lists.

Okay, just one. Athlon follows up ranking the coaches in each conference with an overall list of top college basketball coaches. Coach Jamie Dixon ranks 13th on the list which is more than respectable. Izzo ranks first in case you were wondering who was #1.

Still no word on the final game for the non-conference schedule. And hence, no schedule announced from Pitt. As part of the trend, the only pre-season tournament that hasn’t announced its seedings is the one in which Pitt will participate.

The Atlantis Bracket announcement Thursday leaves just one major tournament to be completely unveiled: the 16-team NIT Season Tip-Off Nov. 21-23. The four hosts are Kansas State, Pitt, Virginia and Michigan. If you were to seed this event then it would probably go 1. Michigan. 2. Kansas State. 3. Pitt 4. Virginia. Virginia and Pitt probably have the most to gain. Michigan and Kansas State play in power-rating rich conferences and are playing strong schedules. Pitt is in the Big East, which will provide plenty of RPI pop and quality wins, but has a soft nonconference slate, putting even more pressure on this event.

No matter what, Pitt will get hammered by the punditry for its non-con this year.

Seth Davis at SI.com has a piece where he spoke to a slew of coaches at various AAU Tournaments this summer about their teams.

When I spoke with Dixon last year at the Peach Jam in South Carolina, I asked him if it was hard to see his team’s season end with that bizarre free-throw fest against Butler that eliminated the Panthers from the NCAA tournament. Dixon shook me off, saying it was always tough to see a season end, no matter the circumstances. He evinced that same even keel when I asked him last week how tough it was to watch his team miss out on the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2001.

“Every season is a challenge,” Dixon said with a smile. “We won 22 games. There’s not a lot of sympathy for us throughout the country.”

Will Pitt be able to bounce back? The answer depends largely on the health of veteran point guard Tray Woodall, who had surgery to fix the sports hernia that sidelined him for 11 games last season. Woodall came back for the final stretch of the season, but he wasn’t nearly the same player he was before he got hurt. Dixon told me that Woodall is “pretty close” to being cleared for practice. Also, 6-6 junior forward J.J. Moore is still recovering from the broken foot he sustained during a pickup game after the season was over.

If Pitt is going to be a ranked team again, it will need production from its new players. Dixon caught a break when the NCAA granted 6-5 junior guard Trey Zeigler a hardship waiver after his previous school, Central Michigan, fired his father as its coach. That allowed Zeigler to transfer to Pitt and be eligible to play right away. Dixon also signed two highly-rated freshmen, 7-foot New Zealand native Steven Adams and 6-3 guard James Robinson. Adams is particularly intriguing because of his height and skill set, but Dixon tried to downplay expectations that Adams will be a high-scoring center. “The main thing he does well is guard the post,” he told me. “But he’ll be a bigger story because of the type of kid he is. He’s mature. He’s all about the team. He’s there for the right reasons. It’s very refreshing to coach a kid who is like that even though he’s coming in with a lot of hype.”

If you followed any of the offseason, general college basketball chatter, one of the topics that got a lot of discussion was the issue of transfers. Some go alarmist that transfers in college basketball has gotten out of control, and that the culture is to blame. Others point out that transfers have always been higher in college basketball than in other college sports. That the numbers really stay rather stable.

And then others just note that it is one particular area that has seen the uptick in transfers. Luke Winn discusses the trend of growing “up-transfers.”

Whereas transferring used to be predominantly an exercise in downward or lateral movement, for players in search of bigger roles or more appropriate fits, SI’s research shows a recent rise in the number of players upgrading teams and/or conferences by transferring. While the overall transfer market is growing at a max of two percent, the number of up-transfers more than doubled between 2011-12 (when there were 12 who became eligible) and 2012-13 (when there are 25, led by Kentucky’s Ryan Harrow, formerly of N.C. State; Louisville’s Luke Hancock, formerly of George Mason; and a host of fifth-year graduate transfers). Early tabulations for 2013-14 suggest that it will feature an equally large amount of up-transfers.

Some of that is a result of the recent change to the NCAA rule that allows players with a year of eligibility remaining, but have graduated, to transfer to another school for graduate school (provided their present school doesn’t offer the particular program) and play right away.

The concern over this is that it is more about schools trying to poach and recruit experienced players from lower programs.

Why does this matter? Because recruiting, some of it legal, some of it tampering, plays a much bigger role in up-transferring than it does in down-transferring. The stakes are higher when NCAA tournament teams are fighting over experienced players who can fill rotational needs. As Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski opined in June, “There’s so much recruiting for transfers or fifth-year players right now it’s incredible. They get recruited harder, I think, than high-schoolers. It’s not a good time.”

Krzyzewski was saying that it’s not a good time for the sport. But two weeks later, his Blue Devils beat out Ohio State for the commitment of former Mississippi State swingman Rodney Hood, the best available player on this offseason’s transfer market. When the 6-foot-8 Hood is eligible as a redshirt sophomore in 2013-14, he could very well be Duke’s best scorer and an All-ACC candidate. Even the coaches who bad-mouth transfer culture — and really, all of them do — know that it feeds a burgeoning secondary recruiting market they can’t afford to ignore.

Another possible factor for the increase in up-transfers (and to give proper credit, but I don’t have the link) was postulated by John Gasaway on Twitter. He suggested that the relatively recent restrictions the NCAA has been placing on the amount of time coaching staffs can go out and recruit/evaluate players has created an inefficiency in the market. One that up-transferring plays a part in remedying. Specifically, that coaches are missing more good players who end up at “lesser” schools at first. An unintended consequence.

Pitt has had three up-transfers under Dixon. 2006: Mike Cook who left ECU after a coaching change in 2005 — sat out 2005. 2009: Chase Adams came from Centenary for his senior year after the school decided to go from D-1 to D-III. 2012: Trey Zeigler now at Pitt from Central Michigan after his dad was fired as head coach.