Questionable Screen Name wrote:
Their list is based on accomplishments and honors, not on who would beat whom if they all ran in the same age. If they all raced and had their best day, I think Eric Hulst might only be in the top 10 barely, if that, but I can see how Hulst is ranked at #2. While you can't penalize Lindgren for not having a national or world meet, you damn well shouldn't penalize Hulst for running in a world championship and winning it. While Virgin and Pre didn't face the best hs runners in the country or the world all in one race, Hulst did. And he won, both in the trials race and at worlds. That honor is greater than anything his predecessors did in hs cross country. Do I think Lindgren, Virgin and Pre would have beaten Hulst head to head? Yes, I do. Were Hulst's honors greater? Yes, they were.
If the best hs stars got together for one all time championship race - okay, maybe a 5k race and a few weeks later an 8k race like you'd get at world jrs - and they all had their best days at the same time, this would be my order of picks:
Dathan Ritzenhein
Gerry Lindgren
German Fernandez
Galen Rupp
Craig Virgin
Steve Prefontaine
Jeff Nelson
Chris Derrick
Lukas Verzbicas (8k distance a question mark for this guy)
Eric Hulst
And see how I'm the guy who's now leaving off guys that "can't possibly be left off, no way"? There are only 10 spots and 20-25 deserving runners here. Somebody's got to lose out. Withrow and Fout won against some of those guys, but I still think if they all ran their best race on the same day, Fernandez, Rupp and Derrick would beat Withrow and Fout. They just didn't do it in the real championship and if you go by honors, you can't put Fernandez, Rupp and Derrick ahead of Withrow and Fout, whom I believe you can't put ahead of Eric Hulst or any of those other top 70s guys. But I still think the best version of Fernandez would mop up with the best of Hulst in a real race.
Then there are a bunch of other guys that absolutely just have to be in the top 10 in some people's books. Reina still has the record at Balboa. Why wouldn't he beat Fernandez, who couldn't even do better than 3rd? Where do you put Kennedy, Goucher and Solinsky? Rich Kimball, Dave Merrick, Thom Hunt, Tom Graves, Eric Reynolds? All those guys have to be ranked, right? Torres isn't to be seen either. Why? Because I think his competition was weaker and he couldn't have made the last fl 4 finals like he did in the 90s. I don't think he could have done it in the 70s if they had the meet then, either. Now, Torres might have won one of those suckers in the Ken Cormier or Chad Hall years, but I don't consider those guys all time superstars and I'm pretty sure few people do.
Now that was the fantasy head to head race. If I was going to change the letsrun list using their own criteria of honors won being most important, depth of competition being pretty important and taking into account where these guys would probably place relative to each other, but not being as important as honors won, I'd go with this:
Ritzenhein
Hulst
Lindgren
Nelson
Virgin
Prefontaine
Kimball
Verzbicas
Goucher
Withrow
No Reina, no Reynolds, no Kennedy, no Davis, etc. High school in the 80s wasn't as tough as it was in the 70s. Even though he won twice, Mohamud doesn't even make the top 20. The 90s sucked. Torres would probably be close using the honors won yardstick. 4 time hs all american is a lot of honors won. But, again, it was the 90s. He doesn't make the top 10 in my book. Goucher does make it out of the 90s because of the "how good were they in absolute terms?" criteria - he beat 8:51 (in the spring) 3,200 runner Keflezighi by 12 seconds with a 14:41+ at Balboa. That's better by itself than anything Torres or anybody else in the 90s did, plus I believe Goucher was undefeated that year.
See how it's all subjective when you throw in those early guys that didn't face the whole country in one championship? Again, I think Lindgren would have smashed Hulst, but Hulst faced everybody and beat everybody, so I'll agree Hulst did more as a hs cross runner. Some of those guys didn't do anything close to that in hs but only because they didn't have the opportunities. So rankings have to be a little bit based on accomplishments and a little bit based on guessing what they might have done, then balancing out the importance of those criteria.
All in all, the letsrun list isn't bad by their own criteria. I'd have left Reynolds and Solinksy off completely. Withrow's season - and who he beat in the final - was more impressive to me than Solinsky's big winning margin over a less touted field. I'd put Verzbicas just lower than 7th pending spring track results to see how he and his competition stack up against the true legends on the stopwatch. And I'd definitely put Jeff Nelson way up there. He was 4th at world jrs and some of his course records were ones Reynolds couldn't get.
But that's just me. So what have the rest of you got for top 10?