First-year Wisconsin coach Gary Andersen has a schedule that’s built for success. The Badgers should start no worse than 3-1—maybe even 4-0—as they head to Ohio State on Sept. 28. After visiting the Horseshoe, the Badgers don’t have a lot of heavy lifting.

This time of year, it’s always fun to look at the rosters and try to pick out the conference’s breakout stars. A year ago, if you had your eye on, say, Venric Mark, Allen Robinson, Jake Ryan or Ryan Shazier, you hit it out of the park. It’s time to go out on a limb and offer my top five candidates for who will go from an under-the-radar player to a household name in 2013.

The Big Ten office announced the conference schedule for the 2014 football season today, as approved by the Big Ten Directors of Athletics. The 2014 schedule will consist of eight games for each of the Big Ten’s 14 teams, feature a new division alignment, include the conference debut of Maryland and Rutgers and culminate with the fourth annual Big Ten Football Championship Game.

At its spring meetings in Chicago, the Big Ten may discuss if it should have divisional play in basketball, as Rutgers and Maryland are set to join the league in 2014 to make the conference a 14-team entity. My advice: The Big Ten should take a lead from the other major conferences—ACC (12 teams), SEC (14), Pac-12 (12), old Big East (15), Atlantic 10 (16)–and not have divisional play.

A quartet of Big Ten softball teams were selected to the NCAA tourney, it was announced late Sunday night. Big Ten regular-season champ Michigan earned the No. 8 national seed and Nebraska the No. 14, while Minnesota and Big Ten tourney champ Wisconsin also made the field.

For the first time since 2005, Wisconsin is headed to the NCAA softball tournament. The fourth-seeded Badgers dropped Minnesota, 9-3, Sunday in the Big Ten tourney title game to earn the conference’s automatic bid to the NCAAs. Watch all of the best highlights from the title game here. Also, catch up on the entire tourney at the bottom of this post.