I'll repost what I posted somewhere else:
"I was happy with the result for Clayton Young too. I think he did enough to hold his head up high. Clayton's elite attribute isn't that he's fast, his times are generally not very fast, it's that he's sticky. Distances shorter than the marathon are tough for him because there isn't enough distance for other runners to come back to him. But he kept up a good pace, and the key is that he negative split the last 4 miles, 4:42, 4:40, 4:39, 4:33, albeit the tailwind. He ran almost the entire race with Morgan Pearson and Joe Klecker, and they really began to fade in miles 11 and 12. So much so that he was running slightly behind them and ended up dropping them by 9 and 14 seconds. History shows that if this race had gone on over the distance of a marathon, not only would he have caught everyone in the field other than the top 4, he probably would have cut into their lead and finished ~30 seconds behind Mantz."
So I think I agree with you fully. That isn't to say Joe doesn't have talent. He said afterwards that he is in the "G League" of marathon training, which I think is pretty fair. But if they were to go in the near future, he would lose on a scale of minutes.