That is right – we have a winner before the contest even begins. The coronovirus has won.
And we all have lost.
The NCAA has officially cancelled the 2020 Men’s NCAA Championship (along with a lot more sporting events). And if there is no men’s NCAA championship tournament, there is no Stomp the Lunatic Contest!
The Lunatic is extremely sad. It might be true that he no longer has to worry about sleep deprivation, or how he would find the time to come up with his bracketology in three more nights, or how he could fix his codes that read the box scores to automatically add the NET rankings (or maybe figure out why it couldn’t read Oral Roberts box scores).
But the Lunatic looks forward to this opportunity to celebrate this amazing tournament every year. And it is gone before it even begun. I guess there is a silver lining that I don’t have to be sad of watching the tournament go without my Boilermakers – who were likely heading to the NIT. Now, I can live with the imaginary belief that they were going to beat Ohio State and Michigan State over the next couple of days and end up winning a game in Dayton as one of the First 4 games……….
I might have to do pointless blogging for a few weeks. Maybe I slowly finish my bracketology – I can’t do worse than the media this year. Maybe I will find my old college basketball video game and simulate the tournament so that I have something to blog about. Maybe I will rant about how all the coaches who cheated in the FBI scandal should be kicked out of basketball.
I hope that everyone stays safe and healthy through the pandemic, and that everyone returns next year, when the Lunatic will return in an attempt to prove that he can predict college basketball better than anyone and will not be stomped again. Because at the moment, despite not losing to many of you in the pool like I normally do, I feel like I have been stomped harder than I ever had in the 20+ years of running this contest.
The Lunatic has been thoroughly stomped.
ps – As I read this to my wife and daughter, Katie said, “YES!!!! Now I don’t have to give up the TV for three weeks!!!!” So, it looks like 3 weeks of watching the Greenhouse Academy on Netflix – as I said, I have been thoroughly stomped.