Merry Christmas from the Staff of Hammer & Rails

I started this crazy idea more than 14 years ago now, beginning on blogger at the start of the 2006 football season as the cleverly named “Boilermaker Football Blog”. I don’t even know if any of you readers are around from those days. I didn’t cover basketball during the 2006-07, but started the next year and changed the name to “Off the Tracks”. That was going to be the name when SB Nation contacted me to start this incarnation in February 2009, but the domain offthetracks.com was owned by a women’s hostel in Alaska at the time.