In sports, I think people want their sports teams to win. If they are going to spend tax dollars on sports teams, they want to win. End of story.
I just looked up the stats for the Alabama football team. Of their “12” offensive starters listed on our lads (there are 12 as it lists 3 WRs, 2 TEs), exactly are two from the state of Alabama. That’s 16.66%. And 6 of 12 didn’t even start their college careers at Alabama - they transferred in.
For the defense, 4/11 are from Alabama (36.36%), 5/11 (45.45%) started their college careers at Alabama.
So the majority of their starters are “foreigners” (not from Alabama) and also transfers.
If taxpayers were given the choice they would overwhelming choose to never spend a dime on Cross Country or Track & Field, especially if that meant their football team would have an extra water cooler or so.
We’ll, I’m a Mormon, my family and friends are all Mormon, most of my neighbors are Mormon, everyone I go to church with is Mormon, etc., so I guess I can say I know a whole lot of Mormons. Probably a few thousand more than you do. Save your little lecture for the other uninformed. A mission is in no way an advantage for those who do it (like I did). It took me two years after I got home to get to the point where I could train again like I did in high school (let alone do college training). Does that sound like an advantage to you?
If you went on a mission and it took you two years to get back to where you were before the mission, something else happened unrelated to the mission.
Yeah, those Utahn's are so brilliant. Taking 2 years off of running, getting completely out of shape and gaining weight that is extremely difficult to come off. I hear that all the great runners are doing this. Maybe before barking out a bunch of bigoted and prejudiced thoughts you should try not running for 2 years and see how that works out for you. Also every team and runner could mimic what BYU does. There is a reason they don't - it isn't that helpful. I wonder how much greater BYU could be without such a disadvantage.
As a former college coach, I would 100% LOVE to have all of my recruits take 2 years off and not run at all and then I get to coach them for years 3-6 versus having them run years 1-4.
It would only take them about 6 months - 1 year max to get to where they could train properly. Taken doesn’t go away. A freshman isn’t going to do a whole lot anyway but a 22-23-24 year old is going to dominate at 19-20-21 year old.
Glad to see you in this thread, Rojo. Did you encourage your recruits to look into options like the Peace Corps? If not, why not? In Eyestone's case, in any event, it's not "all" of his recruits who do the mission—it's probably more like half or two-thirds. Are you fully taking into account the programmatic complexity of managing the logistics of departures and returns, as well as disparate levels of fitness?
On your second point, let's posit that "talent doesn't go away" is true. This simply underscores the importance of recruiting talent. It is not evidence that the senior year performance of Athlete X at 22 following the traditional, straight-to-college, four-years-of-training pathway would be worse (or better) than the performance of the same athlete who does not train for two years, then joins the team and is a senior at 24.
You write that a "a 22-23-24 year old is going to dominate at 19-20-21 year old," but that's clearly not universally true. I'll cherry-pick just one example. Why didn't Lucas Bons "dominate" Nico Young? Because Nico was simply more talented and would have beaten Bons no matter which pathway either one took. The real question is how much better—if at all—Bons was at 24 by following the mission-then-college pathway than he would have been at 22 by following a straight-to-college pathway. Or, conversely, how much worse—if at all—would Conner Mantz have been at 22 if he went straight to college than at 24 after having served a mission?
Stepping back to look at the situation more broadly: BYU Men's XC has had significant success over the past decade. We should not, however, observe a factor that differentiates BYU from other teams (i.e., mission experience of some athletes) and make the logical fallacy of assuming their success is due to said differentiating factor. The question we should be trying to answer is how much of their success is due to the mission-then-training pathway of some of their athletes? And how much is due to the innate talent of the athletes and developmental skill of the coach? In other words, how successful would the program have been if none of their athletes served missions?
You asserted on the livestream from Columbia today that BYU enjoys a "huge" advantage, but I don't think you, I, or anyone else has hard evidence that would actually help us quantify the "advantage." You can appeal to authority ("I was a coach") all you want, but, at heart, this is an empirical question that demands empirical evidence. I suggested one possible—though imperfect—approach in a previous comment. Unfortunately, the most robust forms of evidence are not available—we can't randomly assign comparably talented athletes to different pathways and longitudinally assess progress four or six years later. So we're mostly left with a priori assumptions, anecdotes, and counterfactuals (like my questions above).
I'd be happy to have a written back-and-forth about this if you're interested. At the very least, I think doing something like that would help clarify the actual questions at play and possibly reduce the number of irrelevant, unhelpful, and sometimes frankly bigoted comments on this forum when anything related to BYU comes up.
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It seems none of these coaches are going outside of the rules. Ed may have not been coaching during Arkansas’ reign, but I wonder if he was bothered by the Irish and english runners that scored for their NCAA wins?
Lobby to change the rules rather than disparage these coaches that are within the rules. While he is at it, lobby for an age rule.
When they lost that tie breaker at home, everyone knew Dave would come back and squash them.
Really it’s 4-5 things hitting at once.
Transfer portal, NIL, international recruiting services figuring out the game. Scholarbook was around for YEARS but slow euros would pay 10k to
The Scholarbook article said that the Scholarbook organization cheated. They shuttled Kenyans to different countries to circumvent the visa limitations in place by our State Department.
When they lost that tie breaker at home, everyone knew Dave would come back and squash them.
Really it’s 4-5 things hitting at once.
Transfer portal, NIL, international recruiting services figuring out the game. Scholarbook was around for YEARS but slow euros would pay 10k to
The Scholarbook article said that the Scholarbook organization cheated. They shuttled Kenyans to different countries to circumvent the visa limitations in place by our State Department.
If true, maybe this is grounds for prosecution and shutting the organization down. But it’s going to require getting legislators involved. Maybe those same legislators can go after the bigger conflict-of-interest in the sport, the one where a certain shoe company has collared the sport and turned it into their advertisement, rather than fair play.
The Scholarbook article said that the Scholarbook organization cheated. They shuttled Kenyans to different countries to circumvent the visa limitations in place by our State Department.
If true, maybe this is grounds for prosecution and shutting the organization down. But it’s going to require getting legislators involved. Maybe those same legislators can go after the bigger conflict-of-interest in the sport, the one where a certain shoe company has collared the sport and turned it into their advertisement, rather than fair play.
So then the follow on to that would be to get the corrupt shoe companies that infiltrated college sports out of the NCAA altogether, and so then Diljeet wouldn’t be a duel BYU and Nike coach. And Hedengren wouldn’t be sponsored by the chief snake.
Providence’s men’s XC team has 7 foreigners on it - from Ireland, New Zealand and Australia. I’m sure many Letsrunners are deeply troubled by this fact.
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.
Are you willing to share the data? I’m serious—I work with data for a living and am interested in an answer to this question.
Look, we’ll never get randomized controlled trials or true ceteris paribus comparisons, but here’s one potential way of approaching the question. First we gather a large sample of historical data on D1-bound athletes, half of whom ran a typical career from 18-22 (bin A) and half of whom served LDS missions and were 24 during their senior year (bin B). I assume most, but not necessarily all, of those in bin B would be from BYU’s team. Then we create best-match pairs between the two bins based on high school PBs. Each athlete from bin A would be matched with someone from bin B. Finally, we compare senior year performances of the matched pairs and calculate the overall patterns. This might give us something of a starting point even if it’s methodologically imperfect. (What if bin B performances are stronger, but it’s an artifact of superior training, arguendo, at BYU—hard to rule that out.) And we’d definitely want a sample that included points from across the distribution, I.e, athletes who were poor and middling in college as well as those who were outstanding, whose results might be atypical.
Common sense and human history of athletic development peak ages.
It’s not empirical enough for people without said common sense.
Are you willing to share the data? I’m serious—I work with data for a living and am interested in an answer to this question.
Look, we’ll never get randomized controlled trials or true ceteris paribus comparisons, but here’s one potential way of approaching the question. First we gather a large sample of historical data on D1-bound athletes, half of whom ran a typical career from 18-22 (bin A) and half of whom served LDS missions and were 24 during their senior year (bin B). I assume most, but not necessarily all, of those in bin B would be from BYU’s team. Then we create best-match pairs between the two bins based on high school PBs. Each athlete from bin A would be matched with someone from bin B. Finally, we compare senior year performances of the matched pairs and calculate the overall patterns. This might give us something of a starting point even if it’s methodologically imperfect. (What if bin B performances are stronger, but it’s an artifact of superior training, arguendo, at BYU—hard to rule that out.) And we’d definitely want a sample that included points from across the distribution, I.e, athletes who were poor and middling in college as well as those who were outstanding, whose results might be atypical.
Common sense and human history of athletic development peak ages.
It’s not empirical enough for people without said common sense.
Wouldn’t you want empirical data to help answer an empirical question? Common sense can help us shape hypotheses and define our methodological approach, but it cannot answer the question.
Again, this is not a question of age of peak performance. We surely have the data to map out that distribution—or those distributions, since they will look different for different distances. The question is whether an athlete who takes two years off of training then follows a four-year training program ending at age 24 will lead to results that are, on average, better than than those of the same athlete were he to train without interruption until age 22.
Providence’s men’s XC team has 7 foreigners on it - from Ireland, New Zealand and Australia. I’m sure many Letsrunners are deeply troubled by this fact.
You see this guy edward is what I myself and most of the people I have encountered associated and for the most part just been around in my life would call a coward. He is a Grade A loser does he think no one remembers when they used their competetive advantage 'missionaries doing missions' or whatever that BS he got his runners to loophole with in regards to BSing in a way that he thinks he's high and mighty about foreigners. Now the rules have made it so that he is not only not a winner (once he has won once and will only have won once) and now he is irrelevant. Thats a real zany 'come at me bro' and 'what we're not really about' hot take their edward keep doing you you're #1(1). Change the rules buddy or if you can't at least you can stop by burger king on your way back to utah.
Common sense and human history of athletic development peak ages.
It’s not empirical enough for people without said common sense.
Wouldn’t you want empirical data to help answer an empirical question? Common sense can help us shape hypotheses and define our methodological approach, but it cannot answer the question.
Again, this is not a question of age of peak performance. We surely have the data to map out that distribution—or those distributions, since they will look different for different distances. The question is whether an athlete who takes two years off of training then follows a four-year training program ending at age 24 will lead to results that are, on average, better than than those of the same athlete were he to train without interruption until age 22.
Do you need empirical data to tell you men are physically superior to women?
I do not. Common sense and all of human history performances suffice
Ain’t no way this is the same guy who tried to petition me out of a NCAA final due to a NCAA rule qualifying me 😂😂 Dave Smith one funny dude!! Anyone know if the after-party is in Iten or Stillwater? pic.twitter.com/umo10ypW0u
Yeah, I wonder why people viewed 18 year old Canadian freshman like grant fisher or Justin knight as a lot different than 28 year old Kenyan pros!
Or 25 year old Mormons like Connor Mantz was when he won his 2nd NCAA Cross champs
So assuming it helped for Mantz to take a 2 year mission, why doesn't anyone else serious about their career take 2 years off to build houses in Africa and have the liberty to train half the time and then come back as a beast ready to compete immediately?
Has anyone looked at Mantz's results when he got back from his mission? Winning right away or did it take time?
