Official 2018 NXN Discussion Thread

Oh? wrote:

Royal qualified 4 times, and IMO they ran well each of those 4 times. Not many teams go 4/4, so that's pretty impressive.

I agree that Great Oak hasn't always ran well. Other CA programs have, though, is my point. It's not a disadvantage due to where the schools are from. For any given region, you'll find teams that have run well, and teams that have run poorly. It doesn't matter where your school is located or what climate you're from, you'll find a mix of athletes and teams that are meeting/exceeding expectations as well as those that are falling short.

Royal pooped the bed in 2005. They were co-favorites and finished 6th. Nobody claimed that they ran well, at the time.

Not 4/4 wrote:

Oh? wrote:

Royal qualified 4 times, and IMO they ran well each of those 4 times. Not many teams go 4/4, so that's pretty impressive.

I agree that Great Oak hasn't always ran well. Other CA programs have, though, is my point. It's not a disadvantage due to where the schools are from. For any given region, you'll find teams that have run well, and teams that have run poorly. It doesn't matter where your school is located or what climate you're from, you'll find a mix of athletes and teams that are meeting/exceeding expectations as well as those that are falling short.

Royal pooped the bed in 2005. They were co-favorites and finished 6th. Nobody claimed that they ran well, at the time.

Not many (if any) teams ran perfectly that day. It was a sloppy mess of a course. However, I think Royal did better than most (with some of the Royal athletes running great), therefore I think it's ok to say that "ran well (in comparison to the rest of the field)".

It is true that Meylan projected them to finish second and they ended up sixth. How much of that was due to not understanding how good the other teams truly were, plus how much was due to nuances in scoring? Looking back at that race, I would say that Royal had one of the better races that day. Not as good as the five teams that finished ahead of them (or as good as Jesuit CA), but as good or better than pretty much everyone else in the field. The unfortunate part for Royal was that most of those teams that ran as good or better than them were projected to finish close to them. That's why there was such a stark difference in groups of teams at NTN that year: the top 10 teams scored 217 points or less while the other 10 teams in the field all scored 304 points or more. Most of the Top 10 were teams that should have finished in the top 10, and most of the bottom 10 were teams that shouldn't have finished in the top 10; most of the top 10 ran better than the rest of the field compared to where they had been, while most of the bottom 10 ran worse than the rest of the field compared to where they had been.

To be able to "poop the bed" and still finish top 6 in a field as competitive at NXN would be very rare. Royal certainly wasn't so far in front of everyone that that was the case. They didn't run great, but compared to the rest of the field, they had a pretty solid day.

So Royal finishing 6th when they were picked to win is a solid result, but Great Oak doing the same means they didn't run well?

Royal finishing 6th when they were one of 8 or 9 teams seemingly in the running to trophy is a solid result.

As for Great Oak... which performance are you referring to? I am guessing you're referring to the 2017 boys, in which case I'd disagree they didn't run well. You are basing your perspective of their performance off of someone else's predictions.

Great Oak Girls in 2010, 2012, 2013? no they didn't run well (to varying degrees).

Great Oak Girls in 2014 ran well.

Great Oak ran well on both sides in 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018.

For the most part, Great Oak has done solidly if not well at NXN. Their first three trips (the girls in 2010, 2012 and 2013) are really the only years they ran awful.

For 2017 in particular, This is about how I figured it would play out, vs. how it ended up playing out:

My #1 going into the meet was Mountain Vista CO. I thought they had a decent lead on the rest of the best teams in the nation, with a pretty competitive pack behind them (including Great Oak, but also Loudoun Valley VA, Fayetteville-Manlius NY, Downers Grove North IL, Springville UT, Central Valley WA, Flower Mound TX, Roosevelt CA, and Kamiakin WA). Some of those nine teams beyond Mountain Vista finished among the 8 teams that scored between about 160-225 points, while some of them fall off (the two NW teams, Flower Mound and Roosevelt) while Desert Vista and CBA added their names to the mix. Loudoun Valley ended up doing much better than expected, while Mountain Vista didn't have such a great race.

In short, the difference between Great Oak 2017 and Royal 2005 is pretty dependent on your expectations of the team, how close other teams were and how close those other teams were expected to be. In 2005, Royal was one of 8 or 9 fairly even teams, and finished 6th. That's a solid day compared to the rest of the field. For Great Oak in 2017, they were one of nine teams seemingly in the mix for a trophy finish (not including the one team I thought had a clear edge over the rest), and with 2 more teams adding their names to the mix, Great Oak still managed to finish 6th. That's also a pretty solid outing.

I think the only years Great Oak didn't run at least "ok" at nationals was their first three girls teams (2010, 2012 and 2013). The rest have done somewhere between fine or great in comparison to the rest of the field. Not many teams run perfect races, but Great Oak has done just fine for quite a while now. It seems they either figured things out, or have developed the depth necessary to overcome a couple bad races moreso than other top programs.

Look at Meylan's post-race comments... I quote: "Royal Simi had their worst race of the year."

Having your worst race of the year at Nationals = pooping the bed.

In Meylan's opinion, based on the races he looked at, sure Royal ran their worst race of the year. I imagine that, in his opinion, almost all of those teams ran their worst race of the year. The conditions were awful (typical muddy year at Portland Meadows), and he typically believes teams don't run well at NXN in general. Compared to the rest of the field, I don't buy that they didn't run at least "well". They had some good performances, even if not everyone had a great day. Meanwhile, I don't think he was as high as he should have been on several of those teams (both of the NY teams, ironically, as well as Mountain View and in particular Mead).

In Meylan's opinion, Royal might have had an off day. In my opinion, they didn't run any worse than the average team that was about their level.

actually, scratch that 'especially Mead' part, he had a better understanding of them than he did the year before (he had them #5 in 2005, which was a fine estimation... it was 2004 when he had them way back at like #18 for some reason).

Roosevelt had a few guys barfing their brains out the night before the race. They were never going to be on the podium, but that derailed all hope of a solid race.

Fdeer wrote:

Roosevelt had a few guys barfing their brains out the night before the race. They were never going to be on the podium, but that derailed all hope of a solid race.

Going into the race, I had Roosevelt at #10. With them running about 5 seconds/runner faster (seems reasonable to think that's possible), they're on the podium. Obviously, if they were sick, that wasn't going to happen... but based on their state meet race, they were going to be competitive for a podium finish (as were 9 other teams).

Oh? wrote:

Meanwhile, I don't think he was as high as he should have been on several of those teams (both of the NY teams, ironically, as well as Mountain View and in particular Mead).

Hahaha now you're just being silly.

Meylan projected FM to finish 3rd (right where they finished), and gave Saratoga a solid shot at winning, with a good race (they won). How could he have been any higher on those NY teams? Tell them to skip NTN and run NCAA's instead? Sheesh.

Not 4/4 wrote:

Oh? wrote:

Meanwhile, I don't think he was as high as he should have been on several of those teams (both of the NY teams, ironically, as well as Mountain View and in particular Mead).

Hahaha now you're just being silly.

Meylan projected FM to finish 3rd (right where they finished), and gave Saratoga a solid shot at winning, with a good race (they won). How could he have been any higher on those NY teams? Tell them to skip NTN and run NCAA's instead? Sheesh.

I didn't say he had them drastically underrated, just that he didn't have them as high as he maybe should have. He had Saratoga 70 points behind York, and Saratoga won by 23. I don't think there was much difference between the top teams (FM and Saratoga from NY, York IL, Joel Ferris and Mead from WA, Mountain View UT, Royal CA, CBA NJ and maybe Fort Collins CO). Most of those teams he projected as finishing with anywhere from 139 points (York) to 233 points (Fort Collins), and that is mostly fine. At a meet like NTN, points can add up quickly, and the difference between those team scores isn't what it really appears on paper (even though that's what we're arguing about right now). He had Mountain View at 311 (most definitely underrated). I'm ok with his projections because of the statements he made before the race: his pre-race comments section (note that he mentioned 7 teams that he thought could challenge for the win, only leaving out the two SW teams IMO), plus the qualifier at the top of that page - essentially that it was too early in the NTN history to really understand that well how teams from different regions compare to eachother before the race, and he didn't have all that great familiarity with all of the teams and all of their performances and all of the courses they were running on, and as a result the projections give an idea about what group of runners each individual probably belongs in, the precision of the team projections isn't going to be that great due to too much uncertainty involved in the process.

I think that's where people are overreacting to results: they read too much into the rough projections, and don't give enough credit to the nuance that makes a few seconds here and there total dozens of points and shift things completely. I think that, unfortunately, the wording of his post-race comments emphasizes that: that may not have been a great race by Royal, but it really wasn't much worse than the other teams that were very similar to them aside from those top 3-4 finishers (and the Mountain View team that Meylan was overlooking). If Royal had, say, the seventh best race out of the field of 20, I would say that compared to the rest of the field they had a pretty solid day. For what it's worth, I don't think that's very nearly out of the question especially considering the acknowledgements he made before the race (not a high degree of precision to his projections due to uncertainty and the large grouping of runners).

If you look at Royal's prerace ratings he lists on that page, you'll see plenty of ties and plenty of runners near them. If they run 10 seconds slower than those projections (a reasonable amount of uncertainty + a slightly off day, or maybe better days by other runners, would extremely easily explain that -- especially considering the muddy conditions), they go from scoring about 140 points to scoring about 225 points. They scored right about halfway between that, due to a small handful of teams running notably better than he projected (certainly Saratoga, Mountain View and Jesuit, and I'd argue York and FM and maybe Mead as well).

I'm sure we'd be having this same conversation even if his prerace projections were instead something along the lines of 140 for York, 145 for FM, 170 for Royal, 175 for Saratoga, 180 for Joel Ferris, 190 for Mead, 195 for Mountain View and CBA, and 210 for Fort Collins... even though those scores suggest that it wouldn't take much at all for one team to move up/down several spots. And especially considering that it was the early years of NTN and we didn't understand as well how runners from different parts of the nation compared, and the muddy conditions those runners faced in Portland Meadows.

In fact, if you really want to look into it and compare his prerace projections and the performances at the meet... there were 136 runners that he had ratings for that ran at NTN. Comparing their time to their prerace rating would suggest a 16:41.91 would equal a 200.0 performance if you use multipliers, or 16:39.4 if you strictly use Meylan's +/- system of adjustment. Using those adjustments, Royal's prerace ratings suggest they should have run between a 17:25.3 (multiplier) and a a 17:28.3 (Meylan's +/- system). Royal's actual team average at the race was a 17:25.6, which is almost exactly the FIELD AVERAGE. In other words, Royal ran somewhere between perfectly average and BETTER than the average of the entire NTN field. Hard to say "at worst average" is the same thing as "ran like poop".

Oops, made two mistakes: missed one runner (barely changes the averages any) to make it 137 that were rated and ran in 2005. The other mistake was that I made a simple arithmetic error: the +/- rating using strictly the field average would have been 16:49.4, instead of 16:39.4, though with the addition of the runner I missed it is now 16:49.0 (yeah, big difference...) and the multiplier system would be 16:41.5.

To be clear, this is not how you should accurately rate a race. All I am doing is simply using the pre-race ratings provided by Meylan and the times those athletes ran, and finding the difference. The 137 runners averaged a pre-race rating of 177.9 and their times at NTN averaged 17:55.29, and therefore according simply to the field average a 17:55.29 would be a 177.9 (and you can figure out the rest from there). If you were doing a proper statistical analysis, you'd want to adjust for outliers (and potentially other factors)... but for the purpose of declaring if a team ran an 'average' race, 'better than average' race, or 'ran like poop' compared to the rest of the field, the simple average including outliers is what you want (you're comparing to everyone without qualification).