Editor’s note: Teams will soon begin practicing and college basketball season tips off in November. So, which questions need answering? Today, we look at if this is the year the Big Ten finally wins a national championship.

As sports droughts go, it doesn’t even merit a shrug from Chicago Cubs fans. Why, at 15 years of waiting, Cubbie fans were still optimistic.

But for a league that has been so good at college basketball for so long, 15 years seems like an eternity. Yet that’s where the Big Ten’s holding pattern stands. The last time the conference hoisted a national championship trophy came in 2000, when Mateen Cleaves led Michigan State past Florida.

Cleaves is 38 now.

And the American Athletic Conference is 3 years old … but has a two-year-old national champion.

Since 2000, six different Big Ten teams have gotten within 40 minutes of breaking the hex, but lost in the title game -- Indiana in 2002 (losers to Maryland, and no the Terps don’t count retroactively), Illinois in 2003 (top-ranked team most of the season, but losers to North Carolina), Ohio State in 2007 (Greg Oden and Mike Conley bested by more experienced Florida), Michigan State in 2009 (with a home crowd, the Spartans fall to North Carolina), Michigan in 2013 (upstarts lose to Louisville), and Wisconsin in 2015 (Frank Kaminsky & Co. fade in loss to Duke).

Six more Big Ten teams lost in the national semifinals.

So, is this the year the Big Ten wins the whole thing? The answer is no one knows. College basketball and the NCAA tournament have proven to be wildly unpredictable beasts. What makes sense in September often seems totally misguided by December, let alone March.

The delicious irony, of course, is the team that could get the Big Ten off the schneid is the one that was a total head-scratcher addition when it was announced three years ago. (Aside from Rutgers, that is. But Rutgers defied then and continues to defy now any sort of logic, so we’re going to pretend like that just never happened.) When Maryland left the ACC to join the Big Ten, the athletic department at least had the decency to be honest in its explanation: The Terps were leaving the geographically appropriate, tradition-laden ACC because they were broke and the Big Ten, with its Big Ten Network-lined pockets, offered financial salvation.

What didn’t make much sense was why the Big Ten would take Maryland. At the time of the 2012 announcement, remember, the Terrapins hadn’t been to an NCAA tournament in two seasons, hadn’t reached a second weekend since 2003, and the football team was 2-10 the year before. What could they possibly add?

Fast-forward through a tumultuous start for Mark Turgeon in 2014 (the year Maryland actually changed conferences) that included five players transferring and the chronically burning embers of a hot seat, and the Terps will enter this season ranked either first or second in the nation.

Preseason rankings don’t mean much, but the reason this season breaks well for Maryland -- and by extension, the Big Ten -- is that there aren’t a whole lot of known commodities this season. There is no Kentucky threatening to demolish everyone it runs into, no Duke with a triumvirate of talented rookies, not even a senior-laden team coming off a Final Four a la Wisconsin.

Turnover, mostly of the NBA variety, has changed rosters everywhere, making this one of the more wide open years in recent memory.

Through such a gaping hole of uncertainty strides Maryland, as close to a sure thing as you’ll find this season. Melo Trimble opted to return, giving the Terrapins a bona fide star, not to mention an All-American. Jake Layman is back, and gets help on the inside with the addition of five-star center Diamond Stone. And while losing Dez Wells certainly will have an impact, the blow was severely lessened when Rasheed Sulaimon transferred from Duke for his final season.

That’s as loaded a roster as you’ll see in the country, and one good enough to win a national title.

But it’s not like Maryland has to carry the Big Ten flag on its own. The others are just that for now -- others -- but in a year as wide open as this one, don’t discount an upstart gaining traction as the season bullies its way to March.

Despite the angst in Bloomington, where Emmitt Holt finally ran out of second chances this offseason, Indiana will be a top-15 program. Yogi Ferrell and James Blackmon Jr. anchor the backcourt; Troy Williams is solid at the four and top-20 recruit Thomas Bryant gives the Hoosiers much-needed inside presence.

Michigan State returns Denzel Valentine, Bryn Forbes, Gavin Schilling, Matt Costello and Lourawls 'Tum Tum' Nairn Jr., and presuming he’s eventually reinstated following a suspension for an OWI, adds West Virginia transfer Eron Harris. And anyone who bets against Tom Izzo in the NCAA tournament hasn’t been paying attention.

Out on the periphery sits Wisconsin, with Nigel Hayes and Bronson Koenig; Michigan, with a healthy Caris LeVert back on the roster; and Purdue, with power forward Caleb Swanigan joining Isaac Haas and A.J. Hammons as one of the more formidable frontcourts in the nation.

Whether any of that adds up to a long overdue conference celebration remains to be seen, but the beauty of the preseason is that everyone thinks they have a chance -- even the championship-starved Big Ten.