ED EYESTONE THROWS SERIOUS SHADE AT SUDBURY, GAUSON, AND SMITH FOR INTERNATIONAL RECRUITING

Don't know who asked the question though. Could have been LR. ?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/DRVUdqGkutM/?igsh=MWFudTRwMWttcnEwMA==

bizarre messenger on the age bit

I am not surprised in the slightest that Ed Eyestone hates Black people.

I am extremely surprised that the vast majority of posters here appear to hate Black people.

Like, hate Black people.

For being Black, specifically.

Typical BYU deflection. Who wants to go to college for that long? Except for BYU kids that are not good enough to win in 5 years.

Ed is just pissed his kids have to race athletes that are the same age as his kids. Different phenomena or not, it's very similar. The rules are what they are, currently. And Ed lost his coveted advantage. If Ed can change the rules, he gets his advantage back. Think about that!

Let's have two NCAA champs - the international nationals and the White nationals!

Post of the Decade.

Thanks,

David Christ

Can anyone quantify how much older BYU runners actually are? Theoretically, they could be 2 years older than other teams if they all went on missions, but are they actually? A couple years ago NAU's average age was 21.5 (they had two 23 yr olds and two 24 yr olds) and BYU's was 22.5. Just one year older on average but two years less of training from the mission.

Even if they are significantly older, the problem with the age advantage argument is that you can't separate out the effects of age with that of training because everyone other than BYU runners train continuously from high school through college. How can you quantify how much of the progression is due to them aging vs their continuous training if both are happening at the same time?

Let's put it this way, Casey Clinger's kids will have memories of watching their dad running at NCAA XCs.

I don't have time to read through all the threads, but has anyone mentioned Kip Kangogo yet?

byucougars.com

Kip Kangogo - Men's Track & Field 2002

Kip Kangogo - Men's Track & Field 2002

Open link

"I don't recruit Kenyans" cough cough.

first off I believe Eyestone would say the exact same thing about the men's basketball team, it's just not as relevant to him, and would cause a bigger issue for him. second off, can we please stop talking like mormons are extremists? read some of the scripture before you go on about something somebody told you about mormons

Casey Clinger's career was so long that he competed against runners who were in elementary school when he first raced for BYU.

I think the question of whether missions benefit athletes is an interesting one, and I don't know the answer even though I went on a mission myself.

I was in Japan for two years. Biked and walked quite a bit throughout the mission. Didn't run much -- probably maxed out at 15 miles in a week with most weeks at 0 miles run. (I basically always wanted to run, but companion didn't always). Lost a good bit of weight once I adapted to smaller portion sizes and Japanese food.

It probably would have been beneficial to me in my overall athletic development except for the fact that when I came home, I got depressed. It was weird to be back home and in such a different kind of life. I gained back all the weight I lost and then some. I started running more, but struggled to get in good shape for several years.

Anecdotally, a lot of US-based missionaries who go to Asia (especially Japan) lose significant weight while those who go to other U.S. locations or Europe often gain significant weight.

Anyway, fine to have a belief that "on average, missions help athletes reach a higher ceiling in NCAA time frame", but there's a lot of diversity in the experience.

8:34, great question LetsRun!

Is Ed Eyestone also a "whiny zoomer who want a free handout" now? Kenyan defenders are coping so hard.

I'm not sure how this is newsworthy. I used to live in Utah and found it to be incredibly racist and segregated. Rich east side? All white? Everyone else? On the impoverished west side. The culture is incredibly racist and Ed is entrenched in that. Very glad to live elsewhere now.

Yep, a couple of times.

We have had this discussion about a thousand times on this forum, so forgive me if you are new here. What you said it not true.

Money is fungible. Tax payers (both federal and state) heavily subsidize state universities. While a very small number of athletic departments do turn a "profit" in terms of ticket/TV revenue vs scholarship/travel expenses, they are not financially solvent institutions on their own. They could not survive without the infrastructure of tax payer funded universitiy supporting them. Therefore, they are funded (at least partially) by tax payers. It does not matter if the exact serial numbered dollar bills that the tax payers give them are used to pay the Kenyan's scholarship. Again, money is fungible.

Bottom line: If the Alabama or Oklahoma governments decided to stop funding their universities tommorow, Dan Waters and Dave Smith would no longer be able to field an entire team of Kenyans on full scholarship. That is just reality.The exact path the individual dollars take is irrelevant.

The comparisons in this thread have been interesting, but I think people are skipping the most important context: scholarship investment and program structure.
How many scholarships do you think the schools on these “best programs” lists are pouring into developing American distance athletes? And at what point is it even “development” when you’re handing out 18 full rides, only getting 4–5 decent cross-country scorers, or producing just a handful of Regional qualifiers?

Take Furman, for example. They invest a massive chunk of scholarships into distance every single year. With that kind of commitment, is making nationals 4 out of 13 years really some unbelievable accomplishment? Same with BYU. Yes, they’re clearly a very good program. But when you use every scholarship you have, plus strong NIL backing, to bring in the best domestic talent, then you should be good. It’s not shocking. It’s the outcome of resources meeting recruiting reach.

Meanwhile, a lot of the programs people love to criticize don’t fully fund distance—or aren’t even close. In the SEC especially, this idea that schools are “all-in” on distance is just not reality. No coach down there is dumping 10–14 scholarships into the distance group. They can’t. Their jobs rely on producing points in a conference where sprint and power events dominate. With 2–5 scholarships to build an entire distance squad, you’re not taking long-term development gambles. You’re looking for immediate impact athletes. That’s not a philosophical choice—it’s a survival strategy.

Coaches like Taylor and Henes are outliers precisely because they can build two national-level teams and stockpile depth, as Grace Hartman mentioned. That model isn’t available to most programs, especially not on the men’s side where the overall talent pool is shallower.

And the truth is this: anyone here claiming they’d recruit only under-developed American kids and “build it the right way” in the SEC or at most NCAA programs would be unemployed within four years. That’s not cynicism—it’s how the system is structured.

And is it really fully off? I’m sure they get a bit of running in, you can run anywhere, so it’s not starting back from 0.