2023 was a little bit rough for the Lunatic website. We all know how big of a Purdue fan that he is, so watching his Boilers lose in the first round as a 1 seed was devastating. But that was just foreshadowing. In November, as I started to enjoy the new season of college basketball, I thought I would write an early blog. To my horror, all my WordPress sites were corrupted. I couldn’t even log into them to figure out what went wrong.

But when things go wrong, you have to use it as an opportunity to move forward. You will notice a different look to the website this year. I updated WordPress to the newest version, and that brought a newer theme and look. I am still struggling with editing the blocks and format, but I was lucky enough to be able to login to the databases and copy and paste a lot of the historical blogs into the new site.

At this point, the most important part of the website is restored – the pages that you use to register for the pool and enter your picks. And so while there is still time before March, why wait. The Lunatic is back for another month of sleep deprivation, looking through stat sheets in a foolish attempt to show he can predict college basketball games.  This will likely end in a thorough stomping, but it should be a wild and entertaining ride. And so, I am happy to announce the 2024 Stomp the Lunatic tournament!

I still have a ton of work to do – and not sure that all of it will get done in time. You will notice some differences in the layout of the site. Because of the new WordPress theme, I am going to try to create a navigational bar at the top of the pages to help move throughout the site, whether it be to register for this year’s tournament, enter your picks, check your place in the standings, or enjoy the sleep-deprived rantings of the Lunatic.

On the standings pages, I have created a drop-down menu that allows you to view previous standings through 2008 (the first year I ran the pool on the current website). I have also created a Hall of Fame site that has a listing of past winners and links to the older standings pages.

I am thinking about how to revamp the Bracketology, Handicapping and Statistics pages. Because of the troubles I had with WordPress, I am going to re-design these to be more standalone webpages. They might not be fully restored this year (at a certain point, we need to focus on the current tournament vs. restoring the site), but hopefully, I will be able to figure out a way to continue to stroll down memory lane. Not to mention that it wouldn’t be March without the Lunatic trying to predict what teams will be playing in the tournament and then handicapping all 67 games.

I will eventually send out an email to invite you all to Stomp the Lunatic!  But I can’t send out an email stating that it must be March if it is still February.  Not to mention we all know that I am horrible at managing my email lists.

That being said, Selection Sunday is just three weeks away.  March 17th will be here before we know it. 

But have no fears – while the Lunatic might not be able to restore everything that he wants with the website, we are still ready for the NCAA Tournament to start. While it is certainly not necessary, the registration link is live for this year’s tournament (that being said, it is typically easier to register when you enter your picks). And I have managed to pull all the box scores through Thursday’s games. And I am super excited to watch as the regular season championships get decided over the next 1-2 weeks and the conference tournaments begin. I am sure there will be lots more drama as teams fight to earn the opportunity to play in the NCAA Championship. We will all need to get ready – because it is time to watch an amazing month of college basketball. And of course, it is time to Stomp the Lunatic!!!