College football season hasn’t begun, but here at Athlon we’re already hard at work in thinking about the 2012-13 basketball season. Believe us, the season will be here before you know it.

Every team has questions about the upcoming season, but some are bigger than others.

Even for a league with campus institutions like Jim Boeheim at Syracuse and Jim Calhoun at Connecticut, this offseason was relatively quiet for the Big East coaching ranks.

One of the unfortunate truths of the latest wave of conference realignment is the overwhelming focus on football.

As a result, basketball and other sports have been of secondary concern in some circles. In others, such as at Butler and VCU and in the Horizon, Colonial and Ohio Valley, basketball is the primary engine of revenue. Almost every league in some way has been impacted by the dominoes of realignment.

By Mitch Light

Which team had the best weekend, as far as improving its NCAA profile?

— by Mark Ross

With the 14th season of BCS bowl action about to take place, Athlon reviewed the tapes of the four (now five) biggest bowl games in college football. Since 1998, teams have been fighting to land a spot in the BCS and here are those teams whose performances didn’t live up to the spotlight and prestige attached to the bowl they played in.