After former women's tennis head coach Brian Fleishman resigned in early May, Wisconsin announced his replacement on Monday in West Virginia coach Tina Samara. Samara was at WVU since the 2010-11 season. "We’re pleased to add Tina to our staff," Wisconsin Director of Athletics Barry Alvarez said. "I was impressed with her background and her intensity. I like the fact that she’s developed her own program. She has a vision and ideas to move this program forward." As a player, Samara was a two-time All-American at Georgia. In her 25-year coaching career, she has spent time at Colorado, Louisiana-Lafayette and West Virginia, in addition to five years on the USTA/WTA/LTA Pro tour. In her three seasons at WVA, she rebuilt the program after recruiting two of the highest-ranked recruits in school history. She's also a native of Oyster Bay, N.Y., so that'll make Billy Joel happy. And that makes me happy.

After 30 years, Ed Nuttycombe is calling it quits. Wisconsin's men's track and field coach announced his retirement on Friday, ending a career that brought UW 26 Big Ten championships. He will work with the university through the summer, and will continue to be involved with the program while retired. Simply put, though, the Badgers cannot replace him -- Nuttycombe has won more championships than any other coach in any other sport in conference history. Including cross country -- which he did not coach directly but was responsible for -- Nuttycombe won 52 Big Ten championships. Most recently, those include the 2012 and '13 outdoor crowns.

Tradition Sports Online has been reporting critical news from the floor of E3: The complete ratings for every team in EA Sports' upcoming edition of its college football game. I imagine many of you have played in the past and will, perhaps, be shelling out another 60 bucks for this one. I know I will, because sadly, I'm a real adult with nothing better to do after work. Sigh.//Anyway, you'll see the Badgers are ranked an 88 overall, on offense and on defense. That's, uhh, easy to remember? Naturally, Alabama is a 99 in everything. The 15 top-rated players were also revealed earlier, with South Carolina defensive end Jadeveon Clowney unsurprisingly topping the list.

Tom Mulhern dropped one nice feature on new strength coach Evan Simon that we discussed in this morning's Badger Bits, and he followed it up with this nice breakdown of UW's plan for the seven-week summer conditioning session. Players will now condition every day, Monday-Friday. Granted, the amount of work isn't changing; it's just spread out more over the week. This falls in line with Gary Andersen's stated interest in "prehab to prevent rehab," and it also compensates for UW not running an eight-week session, the maximum mandated by the NCAA. Andersen wants to leave a week at the end for players' "discretionary" time. Mulhern also has the weekly schedule, which is kind of interesting. Basically, Monday is a power day for lower-body workouts; Tuesday is upper-body strength and speed improvement; Wednesday is a no-lift, agility-focused session; Thursday is more strength and lower body, as well as tempo running; Friday is supposedly the hardest day with a focus on metabolic conditioning.

Thanks to this great feature from Jessie Temple of Fox Sports Wisconsin, we're able to get a better introduction to Helland, Wisconsin men's basketball's new strength and conditioning coach. Helland spent 24 seasons with the Bulls and the last 12 as their head strength coach, but the Edgerton, Wis., native told Temple he just couldn't compensate for the rigorous work schedule with his family. "'I sat down and I crunched numbers when I was making this decision,' Helland said. 'If you count home games, where I leave my house at 8 o'clock in the morning, I don't get home until 11:30 at night. I looked at being away from my family 150-plus days last year. I couldn't reconcile that with my family.'"

UPDATE: We can rest easy. Jeff Potrykus of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reports Beatty withdrew his name from the search.//If you thought we were done talking about assistant coaches leaving Wisconsin, think again. Chris Beatty is in his first year as the Badgers' wide receivers coach, though he's currently in the run for the vacant head coaching job at East Tennessee State. Beatty played wide receiver and graduated from there in 1994. The football program was dropped in 2003 but was reinstated last winter. Former Tennessee coach Phillip Fulmer was hired as a consultant and is presumably heavily involved in hiring a head coach. If Beatty does indeed leave, he'll be the second assistant Gary Andersen is tasked with replacing in his first season at UW. Tight ends coach and special teams coordinator Jay Boulware lasted about two months after jumping to Oklahoma in March. Jeff Genyk was hired as his replacement

This is courtesy of @LSUFreek. As far as we're concerned, Bielema doesn't really need to respond now that we have this.

As expected, UW-Madison is no longer at issue with adidas over alleged labor issues at an Indonesian factor, PT Kizone. Back in April, adidas reached an agreement with the union representing the factory workers who complained of significant missed severance payments. The details of that agreement are confidential, though the response from local and national labor groups has generally been positive. UW-Madison also expressed its support of the agreement after it was announced. The university's Board of Regents initially alleged in the suit that adidas must pay the workers $2 million in back wages and benefits, as well as a honor a code of conduct provision. Dropping the lawsuit indicates those are no longer issues for the university, as interim chancellor David Ward went on record to state they've been accomplished.

EA will be announcing more details today regarding this year's edition of Dynasty Mode, and it looks like it'll be a significant upgrade. Recruiting is all in one place, it's point-based (no more time-consuming "phone calls" and such) and everything's streamlined in one place. There's also an RPG element to coaching, meaning you'll get bonuses when your coaches hit certain milestones in recruiting, within games and after hitting various school records. No word on how Tebow gets into this edition, though.