Welcome back to the latest edition of The Audible, presented by Trader Joe's.

I'm Bruce Feldman.

Joined as always by my colleagues from the Athletic, Stuart Mandel and Ralph Russo.

We are going to get into the second installment of our win total prediction by conference. This episode, it's going to be

the Big Ten. We'll get to that in a little bit. We will get to your questions in the mailbag.

Stu is coming to us from Oklahoma City. He is on location. He's actually covering a sport that I'm starting to wonder if he loves more than even college football.

And it's a cool reason why he's developed this passion in the last few years for women's softball or all things softball.

It's because his daughter's into softball.

Or is it because Stu just got tired of all the off-field drama in college football and he was

like, you know what, I'd rather have the big yellow ball instead. Stu, explain yourself. I think it's all

of the above, Bruce. I mean, as you were saying all that, it's like, yes, yes, yes. I mean, it started because,

yeah, my daughter, when she reached T-ball age, I volunteered to be the coach and then have continued to be the coach with each successive year.

And honestly, it started when her, we're in Sunnyvale, California, were about 20 minutes from Stanford.

Her league had an outing to a Stanford softball game.

I had never been.

I had frankly barely watched it on TV.

And it was like, oh, this is fun.

The game moves fast.

I love how the players are just having so much fun out there.

Like they're doing the chance.

They're high-fiving.

Every play is like they just won the World Series. But that started as like kind of casual. And then with each year it's been, okay, now I know more of the players. Now I know even more of the, now I know everything, you know, like, so this is the first year I'm writing about it. And yes, I'm really excited. As of this recording, it hasn't started yet.

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