Princeton mens XC should be sanctioned by NCAA for obvious tanking

The honest effort rule is usually in track. A hurdler who hits too many hurdles, tries to knock them down, is from my experience the most common. But what Princeton did is a disgrace, mocking the sport and showing a complete lack of respect for the sport. Vig should at the least be reprimanded.

I ran XC and track in HS and college. Never once went to a dual or tri meet in my life. I'm from the south and I think the concept is totally foreign there as I hadn't even heard of them until I came to the northeast.

Was this bad sportsmanship? Yep. Silly? Yep. Worth caring one bit about? Not really.

I agree. My two children finished their college careers never having run a meet with fewer than 10 teams in HS or college.

Thanks, but that comes back to my question (which was an honest one): What rule in this meet was broken? The rule you linked refers to NCAA championship competition, and I was already aware of that one.

Though I disagree with the practice, for years now some NCAA teams have "tempoed" certain meets, and plenty of coaches think that's perfectly acceptable...with no sanctions or fines or other repercussions, as near as I know. How are those "tempo races" different in kind from what Princeton did?

Next some crybabies will want a runner disqualified in a race when they jog to an easy win because they are significantly better than everyone else.

This got me thinking. The same is almost true for my two sons for most meets they ran but their first meet of the year often had considerably fewer than ten teams and I've seen other schools with small fields in their first meets as well. It's the complete opposite of my college career. We'd have two meets a year with ten teams or more running. Our season was all about dual and tri meets and our final won lost record.

As far as I can tell no school keeps a won-loss record anymore in either cross country and track as far as I can tell which leads to this question. Does anyone know if there are other collegiate sports that do not keep won-lost records?

More than that: Look at the results. https://tfrrs.org/results/xc/22369/2023_HYP_

Does anyone think that the Yale men are an order of magnitude better than Harvard's? Yale got six men in before Harvard's #2! In what sense is it accurate to say that Harvard made an honest effort to win that meet?

College track and cross country have changed. When I was in school (in the last century), dual and triangular meets were a regular and important part of the Ivy schedule. They were fun and great learning opportunities, and helped athletes and teams find out what they needed to work on.

Now cross has changed. Very few teams race every week, and almost every meet their varsities go to is a "big" one that can affect a team's qualifying for Nationals. Some think the situation is better now and some don't, but we can agree that the sport is different from what it was.

In particular, the HYP meet is different. It used to be a very important meet on those schools' schedules, typically contested in October. Now that it's at the beginning of September, it looks like a "nothing" early-season meet, a rust-buster at best. A previous poster suggested that the schools are contractually obliged to stage it, and that sounds likely; but moving it to such an early place on the calendar shows that it's no longer a serious meet, and I don't think we can fault Princeton (and Harvard) for not taking it seriously.

This is all 100% true, but to send guys out to run a minute slower than my D3 running daughter? No, there is no excuse for this. You are wearing your college uniform and there’s a gun and a clock. Why not race the C team and have them give an honest effort. I don’t blame the athletes, they must have been instructed to run this slow. Were they holding hands? Telling jokes? The coaches should not done this. My G-d, if I was one of the athletes I’d be embarrassed to have this time appear in my TFRRS profile.

I've ranted on this before. No W-L record? And people wonder why ADs find xc and tf among the easiest teams to axe, whether for budgetary reasons, Title IX compliance, or whatever.

I encounter this all the time. We go to a track meet, come back, and the AD asks, "So how was the meet?" "Great! We had a ton of PRs, got better seeds for the conference meet, and had two preliminary qualifiers for Nationals!" "Uh, okay, sounds good. WHO WON?" "Nobody. It wasn't a scoring meet."

Most ADs are actually pretty smart, but how many of them are equipped to handle a sport where, after a contest, you can't just say "We won!"? (Or even "We lost"?) Even swimming does a better job in that regard than our sports do.

I could not agree more.

Because it is not a real sport. Because things like this happen.

How is this any different than what Stanford did this week? I don't remember seeing multiple threads about them.

Because their effort resembles that of an average d1 team.

Good thing you’re not a D1 athlete and can’t fit into an xc jersey.

Didn’t know HYP was the national championship. Hope someday I’m not sitting on my couch hating on young adults who are working hard to achieve goals bigger than I could dream.

First off, were you there? I get it looks embarrassing on paper it's but if you're gonna act like it's rule breaking bad then this needs to be so clownishly bad you get the equivalent of a red card or auto racing black flag for doing it. I consider what they did poor for a D1 but not so bad you wave them off the course. I will address why further down.

Second, it looks to me like they deliberately ran the B or C team, a few guys with no XC meets in TFRRS at all, a couple with very few. Is the "tank" the selection or their effort?

Third, I half wonder if they had an issue with the coach as opposed to the meet. I am curious why a team given a chance to run a varsity XD XC meet runs in a line. I kind of doubt it's "contractual obligation." It might be more, "I signed up for fall practice to train for the 800m not be meet filler." Based on their spring TF events. It feels to me like the time my HS XC made a pair of us soccer players run a 10k for time with the team as a practice and we deliberately loafed it, knowing we had a meet that weekend plus select games on Sunday. He got angry but technically we ran his 10k.

Last, I would assume that at college level "honest effort" would be an objective standard you could apply to any meet on down to D3. Or at least to every athlete in D1. Not a subjective standard relative to that athlete. Otherwise you'd be advocating the absurdity of tossing a Princeton runner for what some kid at Rutgers-Camden on their XC team couldn't do on his best day, who you wouldn't "red card" for averaging 9 minute miles but trying his best.

I am pretty sure the rule is really meant for, say, a miler walking their race at an obvious slow pace, a hurdler who hops out of the blocks then either pushes or kicks over each hurdle slowly, or a "long jumper" who like stops on the board then does a three foot bunny hop. Truly "do not waste our time" stuff that could be the basis for banning them next week. A real "red card" performance.

Oh, I get why you are upset, and since there is no way this traditional meet is ended, the practical response is either gut it out with the "A" team, or send a sincere "B" effort instructed to compete or hang up their spikes/runners. But calling it like a rules violation, no. To me a rules violation has to be beneath any possible mascot "Rudy" that ever sees a meet, perhaps even worse than the slowest D3 jogger you ever saw, and this is not that.

To me the flaw in the analysis is it looks like the men don't run for 2 weeks and the women 3 weeks. And if this was some general issue with the HYP meet the women didn't tank. This was the women tried and the men sent a B/C unit who ran in a line. Either something specific happened with the men and the meet or the guys who got sent didn't appreciate being ordered to be there. That's a protest not an effort level.

If Fred Samara were dead, he'd be spinning in his grave

The guys who ran were all mid d guys. Obv it was a workout. I don’t see a big deal in not putting in ur best lineup for a meet that ultimately doesn’t matter. It’s not like Harvard but their top 7 guys in the race either. Princeton is prob working out who is going to make their top 7, so they are keeping their younger guys on the same schedule as the older guys in terms of racing.