Before I go down memory lane, I want to toss out a few items about the start of conference play as a new calendar year begins.

Buckle up, folks. It’s going to be bumpy (but fun) ride.

Well, it’s fun if you’re winning and pulling off upsets and surprising some people, which seems to be happening quite a bit in the Pac 12 already.

At the top of the heap (and it’s still early) is UCLA, after whipping both Oregon and Oregon State at Pauley Pavilion. Sophomore Jordin Canada is emerging as one of the best point guards in the country. A year ago, coach Cori Close put the Bruins through a pretty rugged non-conference schedule, and they struggled in league play.

Thus far their only losses have been to No. 2 South Carolina and to Cal in a special non-conference game at Berkeley, won by the Bears 108-104 in double OT.

Right behind UCLA are Arizona State, which swept the Bay Area schools, and surprising Utah, which is rebuilding under first-year coach Lynne Roberts. On Monday, the Sun Devils beat Stanford 49-31, the lowest single-game scoring total ever for the Cardinal. ASU also has upset Florida State, avenging last year’s Sweet 16 loss. Charli Turner Thorne, who got her 400th win in December, has another contender in Tempe.

The upsetting nature of the Pac 12 reached down to Tucson, where Arizona knocked off Cal on Monday. Utah also scored a mild surprise in beating Washington 88-83. Kelsey Plum, the leading scorer in the country, had 35 for the Huskies, but every game in this conference figures to be a real battle. Most of the teams are that closely pitted together.

Southern Cal is coming off losses to UCLA and Oregon State and faces the Bruins again on Sunday, but the Trojans are improved. So are Washington State and Oregon. Colorado is 5-8 but the Buffaloes have played a great non-league schedule, with losses to Kentucky, Florida and Missouri, and took UW to the limit over the weekend.

I’ll dig into other conferences as the season goes along but I’ll just mention briefly here that I think the Big Ten is shaping up to be very strong at the top, and not just with Ohio State’s impressive win at Maryland on Saturday. That was the first loss to a conference foe for the Terps since they joined the league. But after losing Duke transfer Lexie Brown, Maryland still looks like a Final Four-caliber team, giving UConn its best game of the early season over the holidays at Madison Square Garden.

In the SEC, Kentucky had been flying high but got waylaid at Auburn over the weekend, the first loss for the Wildcats after a strong start that included withstanding the departure of four transfers. Tennessee looks a lot better than in the early season after opening conference play with a win at previously undefeated Missouri.

The Lady Vols also won earlier at Oregon State and aren’t completely out of the woods yet, but they are getting into better offensive rhythm and getting some injured players back in the rotation.

In the ACC, a couple of eye-opening results of note, with two ranked teams going down hard on the road: Virginia never trailed in downing Miami by 20; and Syracuse blew out Duke 86-50 at the Carrier Dome. The Orange hit 14 3-point shots and forced 32 Duke turnovers and just missed getting ranked.

As for Duke, I don’t know what to say. Yes, the Blue Devils are young but still boast a roster full of high school All-Americans. As Steve Spurrier used to wonder about his rival at Georgia, what happens to all the great players they sign? A number of Duke signees have transferred out in the last few years, although Brown will be a welcome addition next year.

But it’s been a decade since Duke was in the Final Four, and doesn’t appear to be any closer to getting back despite the talent and top-rated recruiting classes.

One other school to note, and keep an eye on this one: Duquesne. Dan Burt was promoted from assistant coach when Suzie McConnell-Serio took the Pittsburgh job a couple years ago. The Dukes (13-1) defeated St. John’s before the holidays and ripped Pitt 79-65 last week before the real shocker: an 89-58 trouncing of Dayton Sunday in their A-10 opener.

McConnell-Serio did a great job turning Duquesne into a respectable program. Burt seems poised to lead them to their first NCAA tournament appearance.

Coaching milestones for McGraw, Hatchell, Buscaglia 

Notre Dame’s Muffet McGraw got her 800th win Sunday as the Irish came from behind to defeat Pittsburgh 65-55. A total of 712 victories have been at Notre Dame; she began her career at Lehigh, winning 88 games from 1982-87. What’s even more remarkable is that McGraw has has had only one losing season, a 14-17 mark in South Bend in 1991-92, to go with an NCAA title, seven Women’s Final Four appearances and 22 NCAA tournament trips.

McGraw was inducted into the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame in 2011 and joins nine other women’s coaches with 800 or more wins at the Division I level. She’s in even more elite company among men’s and women’s coaches with at least 800 Division I victories, seven Final Fours and five national championship game appearances: Pat Summitt, Geno Auriemma, Mike Krzyzewski and Dean Smith.

North Carolina’s Sylvia Hatchell is second only to Summitt in victories at all levels with 972. On Sunday she won her 700th game in charge of the Tar Heels, who downed Clemson 72-56 in their ACC opener. Hatchell won 272 games and an NAIA national title at Francis Marion before coming to Chapel Hill in 1986 and was inducted in the Naismith Hall of Fame in 2013.

Also joining the 700 Club is Robert Morris coach Sal Buscaglia, whose team beat Wagner 66-44 on Monday. Buscaglia has coached at Manhattan and Buffalo and Hilbert Junior College. He’s led Robert Morris to three Northeast Conference titles and three NCAA appearances after taking over a dismal Robert Morris program when he arrived 13 years ago.

Buscaglia also is retiring at the end of the season. His son and associate head coach, Charlie Buscaglia, has been named his successor.

Tennessee tops all-time poll rankings

The number 700 keeps coming up this week for another reason: The Associated Press media poll released on Monday is the 700th since Mel Greenberg began it in 1976. He’s crunched the numbers several different ways on his blog but I’ll pull out a few items from his list of all-time appearances.

Not surprisingly, Tennessee is No. 1 this “poll of polls,” with 686 appearances in nearly 40 seasons. Think about that for a minute. The Lady Vols have been unranked only 14 times in all those years. Fourteen!

The rest of the Top 5 fleshes out as follows: 2. Georgia (522); 3. Texas (490); 4. Stanford (485) and 5. UConn (454). Louisiana Tech, Maryland, Duke, North Carolina and Penn State round out the Top 10.

The first season of the poll was the last season in which a small college won the national title. Delta State completed a three-peat, following Immaculata’s three-peat at the start of the AIAW era. The 1976-77 season was notable for other reasons. This is when the big “football” schools really began flexing their muscle with Title IX scholarship resources. The amounts of money were fledgling compared to the full-ride rosters of today, but it was starting to pay off.

The 1976-77 season also was when Tennessee began making its mark in the sport in a serious way. Summitt was known as Pat Head at the time, only a few months removed from playing for the U.S. team in the first Olympics for women’s basketball.

She also played a freshman point guard named Holly Warlick, who like most of her teammates was from the state of Tennessee. This is how localized the sport was at the time.

According to the AIAW format, teams reached the 16-team national tournament (all played at one location) by competing in a “state” championship, then a regional tournament that was strictly geographical.

The Lady Vols finished second in Tennessee, then won the AIAW Region II championship, which earned them the right to go to the nationals for the first time. This was played at the University of Minnesota, and it was a Sweet 16, Elite 8 and Final Four rolled up into one.

Tennessee fell to eventual champion Delta State before securing a third place finish nationally over Immaculata, and 5th in the final Mel Greenberg poll.

The following season, in 1977-78, the Lady Vols finished at the top of the poll, but were upset by Valdosta State in the regionals. At Pauley Pavilion, UCLA won the AIAW title, which had switched to a Final Four format, in the final season for Ann Meyers, the first female scholarship athlete for the Bruins.

While Tennessee fell victim to one of the last small-college powerhouses, the sport was starting to change in a dramatically different way. The Old Dominion and Louisiana Tech dynasties would soon follow, along with the NCAA era. As the poll began its second decade, Summitt finally had the first of her eight national titles in 1987.

As it turned out, the poll came along at just the right time, providing the sport some publicity that it wasn’t getting any other way. Mel’s put together several posts to break down the historical poll results, including full appearance histories for Tennessee and UConn.