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

They cheated?

What does Nikki have to do with this thread?

The people claiming BYU is as bad as the coaches bringing in older foreign athletes are a special kind of stupid. BYU Mormon athletes don’t train for two years while on their missions so they’re at a significant disadvantage in comparison. So stupid

NM has three runners from NM. Maybe do your research

Ed complains people will accuse him of racism. Then says a us born Kenyan. Um to non racists that’s just an American. We even have an amendment in the constitution that says that.

How many black runners are on BYU's racist teams?

Tell me you've never been to Utah without telling me you've never been to Utah.

Utah produces an enormous amount of local talent. Eyestone has an extremely fertile backyard to recruit from. Talented white LDS kids from all over the US are busting down his door to get on the team.

Why would Eyestone need to break immigration F-1 Visa laws to pay Kenyan professionals to run for him with that recruiting pool?

I get it, some coaches are willing to break the rules to win. They know full well their foreign athletes are blatantly violating their Visa agreement. But somehow Eyestone is the bad one?

To answer an empirical question like "How much superior is men's athletic performance, on average, to women's athletic performance?," you need empirical data. And, in that case, we have the data and the data are clear.

The point I have tried to make is that we do not have the data that would permit an answer to the question at play here. The question is not a binary "On average do 24-year-olds outperform 22-year-olds?" Or even "By how much do 24-year-olds outperform 22-year-olds?"

The specific question here is much narrower, and must take into account the training interruption. That is the critical element: "how would the performance of an athlete who takes two years off of training then follows a four-year training program ending at age 24 compare to the performance of the same athlete were he to train without interruption until age 22?" Conner Mantz was a great NCAA runner. But he would have been great with or without a training interruption. I am curious to know whether we can quantify the difference between the two scenarios. It's a compelling question to me, and I would love to see data to help answer it because we can't common-sense our way to an answer.

Rono was from a different time. There were Kenyans on teams back then but not the huge numbers that some teams have now. What Smith is doing at Oklahoma State is ridiculous.

I don’t think that Kenyans shouldn’t be able to compete but there should be limits on numbers. The NCAA, for all sports, should also require that athletes really are “student-athletes” and be making progress toward a degree. Drug testing also should be ramped up.

We do this in Canada. There are Canadian Content (“Cancon”) laws to protect Canadian artists and athletes. Radio stations are required to play a certain percentage of Canadian songs daily; otherwise Canadian artists might never be heard because of the influx of British and American music (as well as Australian, Irish, etc). The Canadian Football League has rules mandating a certain number of Canadian players or else it would be almost entirely Americans who couldn’t make the NFL.

The US is almost never in need of this sort of protectionism but our niche sport is certainly one area where it is.

Tough talk by Eyestone, but without the Mormon pipeline, a college in Utah would not be competitive. He would have the same choice as Smith; have a crappy team or recruit Kenyans.

The Mormon pipeline and central location to such a high LDS population is a natural advantage, though, just like BYU's elevation advantage. There's no wrongdoing in having natural advantages. That would be like saying a runner with higher cardiovascular capacity and recovery ability than me has an unfair advantage over me.

Go Ed!!!

ALL BYU DOES IS RECRUIT INTERNATIONALLY!!!....For converts and souls on their LDS students' missions (and of course 10% of their new converts' paychecks). So it's ok to send thousands and thousands of eager missionaries all over the world, often to very underserved vulnerable places and recruit these folks for the church, their salvation, their tithe, etc, but when it comes to things like NCAA cross country they are now undesirable and it's "non-US citizens need not apply"?

Not to mention the pause on eligibility stuff they've taken advantage of forever.

Seems like BYU has the ultimate pipeline to endless international talent and may be missing the chance of a lifetime to bump their numbers up both for the church and the teams as the NCAA continues to unleash the NIL/post-COVID Kraken.

This is sarcasm btw, written to point out the hypocrisy. I know it goes much deeper than that, especially given the church's troubled revisionist history on lots of race/color/social issues but think about it.

My coach also only recruited US citizens to try to develop American talent and US distance running as best as he could, and he was also honest about it with the press, but he didn't call out other coaches and we weren't attached to a church that bases so much of its success and identity on the stuff mentioned above.

Shouldn't compare BYU seniors who went on mission age with freshman of other schools that didn't go on missions.