It’s your senior year of college and you haven’t been to an Illinois football game since you willingly joined Block I not knowing any better as a freshman.

I challenge you: Go to the Illini football game Saturday.

Most likely you are laughing at me for even suggesting such a horror. Go to an Illini football game, you hungover undergrads say, but I have laundry to do and the dog needs walking and the paint drying on my wall needs someone to watch it.

Hear me out.

The odds are stacked against you going to the game: It’s the beginning of Thanksgiving break, there’s rain in the forecast and our university’s football team is giving everything it’s got just to get to .500.

Forget all of that. If you’re a senior, this is the last home game of your college career (unless any of you aspire to take a super senior victory lap next year!). You might not care about the football team, but you came to a Big Ten school. I have a number of friends and acquaintances who go to this university and have never been to a football game.

How can one go to a Big Ten school and never go to one game? Shame on you.

Don’t let the awfulness of our football program deter you. That’s no excuse. The good thing about having a program that hasn’t finished with a winning record in the regular season since 2007 is that tickets are easy to come by.

Find yourself a couple of $5 cheap seats and sit anywhere you’d like, there will be plenty of open space in the stands. If you really, really despise the idea of watching Tim Beckman’s squad, just imagine you’re watching a game that is worth your time.

Pretend Illinois and Penn State are the Patriots and the Packers and this is Super Bowl XLIX. Which team is the Patriots and which is the Packers? Well, I’ll let you decide that one.

Seriously, imagine Illinois is any team you’d like. Penn State coach James Franklin is. He called Illinois the Hoosiers in front of the media on Tuesday. If this were basketball, that would have caused an uproar.

But this is football. So, as many Penn State fans probably thought after that comment, what’s the difference?

Chances are, as long as the Nittany Lions show up somewhere in between Champaign and Bloomington, Indiana, they will come away with their seventh win. I bet Franklin is licking his chops at that $200,000 bowl bonus he’s going to see, the one he didn’t expect to receive for at least another two years with the bowl ban Penn State was supposed to have.

You don’t have to sit in the student section. There will only be 12 or so people there anyway. You might get lonely. Go sit under the overhang on the east side where you won’t get wet.

Then sit back, relax and enjoy some good ol’ pigskin. Do what you have to do to make the game watchable. Make bets over/under the number of plays it will take before Illinois next turns the ball over. That might actually make you want to claw your eyes out a little bit less.

If halftime comes along and the Illini or the Patriots or the Packers or the Hoosiers — or whatever you decide to call them — are in a deep hole, feel free to bail.

You didn’t think I was expecting you to stay for four quarters, did you? Go home to your families for your week off knowing that you actually managed to drag yourself to Memorial Stadium for a game.

That, in and of itself,  seems to be a major accomplishment for any student on this university’s campus.

Sean is a senior in Media. He can be reached at sphammo2@dailyillini.com and on Twitter @sean_hammond.