Big Ten Monday Morning Mailbag Call: What questions do we have?

You ever just sit and ponder life for a while? Wonder what decisions you made that led you to this point?

I showed some aptitude in middle and high school. Good grades, competed on the quiz bowl and math teams from an early age, whatever. Around the summer after my freshman year, we decided to start looking at colleges. But the first people to visit Evanston were...everyone except me. While I was on a marching band trip to Colorado—unmemorable save for the awkward hormonal teenage mixing on a bus across Nebraska and the bad mix CDs you made for that one girl—my parents took my two younger siblings to Chicago.

They swore I would love Northwestern, a college I knew basically as “the purple one whose basketball team runs that goofy offense and defense.” My little brother brought back a lacrosse ball he found on the Lakefill. That was about that until I visited it the summer before my senior year.

Fast forward sixteen years and I now have a degree from that institution, a wife I met during but not at that school, and a child.

I turned off a football game featuring that university today, with my team trailing 17-0 at halftime.

Those are two unrelated stories, a commentary on the sheer fucking stupidity that I still felt mad about the smoking crater left behind in Evanston. That I watched thirty minutes of football and over an hour of commercials in one half. That my father-in-law—who knows jack fucking shit about football—piped up “Oh, so they really are going to be that bad,” signaling that it was time for me to turn the TV off, fire up the boat, and go drink a cooler full of beer while sitting in a lake.

Ask us your questions about Big Ten football, life, or anything in between, and we’ll try to get you some answers by Thursday.