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

Only Americans in the NCAA. There’s really nothing the NCAA can do about the ages as they would be sued for age discrimination. But allowing older athletes definitely hurts the development of younger athletes coming out of college. I am surprised some young aspiring runners don’t forgo college for a free years and just train and walk on.

All the small minded people scream racism. Garbage. This is America and not Africa. You are welcome to move there.

I just looked up a stat, BYU has a total of 68 (six eight) Laminates aka Native Americans in attendance, fwiw.

My take is there should be no age limits or nationality restrictions to compete. Whoever is allowed to attend the school (hint, almost anyone) can participate in sports. I'd change the current clock to a seven year window and add more with the current exemptions. I would also broaden the religious exemptions to people pursuing whatever "enlightenment" they wish, not just those preaching to and trying to convert others, "to the only true religion"

I think the international thing will explode in the next 5 years.

can’t wait to see what everyone has cookin

The only racism on this thread is toward Mormons.

The issue with this is that medical redshirts aren't just a cross country issue.

I don't think the limitation should be age at completion, I think it should be age at the start. A lot of college sports use older athletes, the first that comes to mind for me is actually college hockey, where players often finish their junior careers before starting (this includes many Americans and Canadians). Hockey is a high contact, high injury rate sport. It would be unfair to deny players redshirts just because they went up through the juniors system.

You should start your college career before your 21st birthday. The old super-senior is a niche issue. Most kids who go USHL/CHL to NCAA finish by the time they're 24/25, and the ones who don't have a serious injury. The bigger institutional issue would be, for example, the NCAA accepting 24 yo SHL/Liiga/NLA players. That's problematic because at that point you're not developing talent in any meaningful way, and there's also no way for teams to compete against such talent with normal college age kids.

No idea. I guess you are a special kind of genius.

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I'm 100% with Ed on this issue. I know that my username clearly states my bias. But I do think reasonable is reasonable. There's no other college sport to my knowledge that is being abused as such right now.

Volleyball has international recruitment. But those girls are actually 18. College hockey often has former Junior players, USHL/CHL, those include Americans and Canadians, who often start around 20 yo, but they're not like former pro level players from say the SHL/Liiga/NLA. The same deal with college basketball, there's some fluctuation in age range but we're still generally talking about 18-20 year olds, just from other countries.

This is for specific reasons. There are pro volleyball leagues abroad. There are pro hockey leagues abroad. There are pro basketball leagues abroad. 25 year olds don't want to play NCAA when they can play pro in their own country. It's a unique phenomena where in track, it's very hard to make money unless you're the top in your event, so professional runners come here to run, but it's still tremendous system abuse.

The lack of a lucrative foreign pro scene in running has really made it the ideal candidate for foreign professional recruitment and that's really problematic. For me, it's not even a problem of the nationalism element, it's the age and professionalism abuse. I have no problem with Simon Majok of South Sudan playing for Memphis because I know he's 18. If another country has a really talented kid, bring him over, but if you're just recruiting professionals from other countries, it really defeats the purpose of the NCAA.

Not deflection, just basic economic analysis. If we assume coaches are rational actors competing for finite rewards (in this case championships or podium placings), and we assume, as you posit, that one coach (Eyestone) has found an "advantage" that allows him to outcompete other programs, why do the other coaches not pursue that "advantage" to optimize their own outcomes? It is not "Eyestone's coveted advantage"—it is available to anyone. The fact they don't pursue it suggests, at the very least, that the assumed "advantage" is either not actually an "advantage" or is outweighed by other tradeoffs, such as the added complexity of managing a program where athletes are gone for a significant amount of time.

We are dealing, at root, with an empirical question (and I'm sincerely interested in knowing the answer). Which of the following pathways will, on average, lead to superior outcomes?

(A) Athlete X enters college at 18 and trains and competes for four years.

(B) Athlete X takes two years off with zero to minimal training after high school, returns to college at age 20, and trains and competes for four years.

How will performance at 22 following pathway A compare to performance at 24 following pathway B? It's an empirical question, but we are unlikely to ever have the most robust forms of empirical evidence—like randomized controlled trials—to answer it. So we are mostly left with counterfactuals to argue over.

--Conner Mantz won two XC championships following pathway B. What results would he have had following Pathway A? I think it reasonable to assume his results would have been similar.

--Creed Thompson got 12th at Nationals last year aged 22 following pathway A. What place would he have achieved (in 2026) following pathway B?

I'm not sure anyone actually knows the answer to these questions—myself included. My hunch is it would be a mixed bag. Some would have a small benefit following pathway B, but certainly not all; some might perform worse. Maybe even, on average, it could be a small net benefit, but we cannot ignore the extra burden in programmatic complexity of having to manage departures and returns, with some athletes reintegrating at much reduced levels of fitness. I think if you polled coaches across the NCAA, most would not want to deal with it.

this ain't wrong but begs the question... what is the point of college athletics beyond football and basketball, that is (the revenue generators)?

At present Ed Eyestone does more at the college level to develop American runners for success on the world level than just about any other US college coach. That's my 2 cents.

Yeah, this too. Like, clearly I'm a fan so I have some bias. But he's coached Kenneth Rooks, Dan Michalski, Conner Mantz, Clayton Young, James Corrigan, also Jared Ward in the past.

Obviously he's had some highly rated recruits recently and all the more as success attracts recruits but he's had a long history of taking guys who were overlooked and bringing the best out of them. And that's a skill that we need more of in US distance coaching.

I’m not saying it is an advantage to recruiting to make kids go on missions. I’m saying it’s absolutely advantageous to maximizing athletic potential while still in college for American distance runners.

This fact is not predicated on Ryan Vanhoy being able or unable to talk recruits or existing athletes into taking a mission trip so they can compete at a more ideal age as juniors/seniors.

A tad bit hypocritical since byu is old af in all sports BUT his point is valid. We’re running into the same thing in freestyle wrestling. American coaches who coach Americans also coaching other countries athletes even at the same weight. It’s some bs.

And I have argued that what you posit as self-evident—it is "absolutely advantageous" to have a two-year break with minimal training so as to be older than competitors—is not, in fact, self-evident. We need empirical evidence to answer the question. But we are unlikely to get it, so we are mostly stuck arguing based on assumptions and counterfactuals.

Maybe you need that. I have all the data I need to realize having 5 years from 20-25 is preferred than 5 years from 18-23 for far more runners than it is a hindrance.

Why not just get better at coaching then? Or stand and make a change to the rule? This was just made to get clicks, who f*cking cares. Smith is spot on. Not his fault, and he can do whatever he wants.

I read this article online elsewhere before it blew up here on LRC. It's possible someone else had made an observation similar to mine already, but here goes: It was obvious this article would generate a lot of comments, and my initial reaction was, "this reporter - or his editor - sure didn't do their job!" The Deseret News does a good job covering Utah running, particularly past and present BYU athletes. But, any reporter or editor worth their credentials would have added context about Mormons going on missions and frequently being older. It's absolutely a big factor - duh! Deseret News had an obligation to either bring this up with Ed for his response or else point it out in the article themselves. This is the internet age. It ain't just the locals reading what you write!

One thing I do know is JG wouldn't have missed this point

Mormonism isn't a race, it's a cult.