D1 Women’s XC Championship Simulation Countdown

Care to share where in the world you heard that? e.g. friend of a friend? message board?

Hi Blank. Not if she is running USATF cross-country that day. But then again, since she is sponsored by a ‘certain company’, maybe she will be put on the team (if she wants it) without having to go through an official tryout.

You’ll just need to believe me. I’m not going to name the person that told me on a public forum.

I was there. After race she was pointing to it and they tended to her in medical tent.

This contradicts other posters that said she didn’t even make trip.

They are not talking about today. They meant she was in the medical tent after ACCs. She was leading by a huge margin and then fell apart late in the race to finish either 4th or 5th. She took a bad stumble right before the finish line. Didn't fall, just stumbled awkwardly and caught herself. Interestingly, if you watched the race on YouTube, she is not seen again after finishing. The NC State runners are all hugging and celebrating together and she seems to be the only one of their top finishers missing.

I try to keep things fairly transparent. A brief description is at:

bijanmazaheri.com

LACCTiC | Bijan Mazaheri

@honey_bijan

A website I developed in 2021 to convert cross country performances from varying course difficulties to their track 5k equivalents. The results are used to provide sophisticated rankings and race simulations. The frontend is...

Open link

The “secret rating” is just the equal weighted mean. If I used the displayed ratings (which emphasize each person’s two fastest TiCs), then everyone would be estimated as their fastest performances, which would make all the ratings faster, etc.

One detail I did leave out is that I don’t use ratios of times, but instead take logarithms of everything. This makes the ratios differences and turns multiplication into adding. The means are then effectively geometric means, suggesting everything is log-normal (which I think is right, but I’m not sure).

I guess I could make these resources easier to find. There’s some level of details that are hidden in the code from lots of tweaks I’ve made over the years. Maybe that’s the secret sauce, but I’m usually surprised by how little of a difference most tweaks make. For example, I just removed 10ks from the rating assigning part a few hours ago (at your suggestion!) and saw the ratings barely change by 1 second. I also switched mean to median at some point and it made a similarly negligible difference.

Im glad so many people like the website. I honestly mostly made if for myself to geek out over hypothetical races between D3 and D1 teams. It got more attention than I ever expected it to.

Thanks for your clarification; hadn’t heard that. So how do you explain the team photos posted earlier this week showing her out running with Gapes, Napoleon and Anderson, while smiling?

Notre Dame with a peak performance levels up nicely against a modified NC State roster. Oregon is a bit of a mystery but we do know had that they have not done it with domestic talent. NC State, BYU, ND and to a lesser extent Stanford are the domestic pipelines. Routing for the teams that try to develop their rosters domestically and promote academic standards. If it wasn’t for this group we would have mail order recruits and a severely diminished interest in the sport at a grassroots level.

In my view, the current season two fastest performances are of much higher value than any track performances from last spring/winter. But it is understood such data doesn’t arrive for most athletes until Conferences are completed. So then, maybe an ‘update switch’ could be implemented, whereby once that data arrives, the ratings can be reset to heavily weight those values (I.e. two biggest current season performances), in order to improve simulations specifically for the Natty’s big dance.

They seem to be peaking nicely. They had a dominating performance at regionals and the sense is it was somewhat measured. They are more consistent than previous years and deeper. If the low sticks go really low and the rest peak together there could be a surprise like Nuttycombe

See slide two from “All eyes on Regionals”.

At any given point, someone will have top times. You don’t know when the “real times” arrive unless you index “important” races. I try to automate this with race importance (which determines the weighting of the overall rating). Once there are enough xc results, the weight of track times goes down.

The equal-weighted average is only used for adjustments. Simulations use the weighting that prefers important races and top times (which determines the Lacctic rating).

I could get rid of track times altogether, but top individuals (usually) don’t run all-out every race and sometimes don’t run all out until nationals (especially on the men’s side). Track PRs stabilize this a bit.

This was overall better for ND, but not Bonner Dalton's best day. But still per the laactic tic's NC state would have been a much better team at regionals (head-to-head 1/2/3/6/10 vs 4/5/7/8/9 vs ND - with the 1-2-3 well ahead of 4).

Overall it looks to me like:

If everyone runs for everyone (incl Hutchins) NC St is favorite. Not by a lot, but favorite.

Take out Hartman and BYU becomes favorite.

Take out Hutchins (and Hartman) and it looks to me like a 3 way tossup in a pretty high scoring affair.

But of the 3 teams I think OR has the most as yet unseen upside potential.

FL, Iowa St, ND, NM fight it out for 4-7.

I am still hopeful BYU and NC St can go 1-2 in some order and Diljeet and Henes can smile at Shalane, Palmer, etc. Half of AA's may be from Africa with none on those 2 teams.

This is good analysis but what else does MBD and Aramini have to do to prove they are legitimate competitors with all but JH and Lemingole? Chisolm used to be the star and now is the #3, but is very capable of being AA. Novak, Farley, Olson and Huyler bring consistency. This is a much more consistent team that years prior. Other than JH and Engelhardt who has been a better true freshman than Huyler? Olson is hugely improved. Stegall has stepped up for Florida but ND are deeper. Stanford may be back in the mix but MBD and Aramini are a match for Bunnage and Kennedy at the moment and the rest of the squad is better.

Dalton at her best, such as at ACC, for sure.....but yesterday seemed well off that running about 20 seconds slower than at ACC while teammates ran the same time, or in the case of Aramini much faster. Chisolm seems to be gaining consistency, but not top 20 or 30 consistency. Other than at ACC, Aramini seems to be at roughly the level of Michalak, who seems projected to be 20-30th, not top 10. Olsen and Huyler appear to be well back of Engelhardt and Rauber. ND is a good squad and could get 4th but I don't see them competing with the top 3 unless some things go very wrong for those teams.

Just my opinions, but also what laactic seems to be saying as well.

Are you overlooking the fact that one of NC State’s key scorers is a foreigner?

Look at the enormous inflation in the calibre of the top five from when NC State last won the Championship in 2022 to now:

2022……………..2023
KT 15:20……….GH 15:20
KC 15:29……….AN 15:20
SB 15:47……….HG 15:21
NM 15:57………BM 15:35
BR 16:07……….SE 15:47

How far back do you reckon that squad of 2022 would finish today?

When people focus on african athletes they really are telling on themselves. The issue in the NCAA isn't africans, it's people that aren't age appropriate for college. Gapes is a foreigner but she is a 21 year old in her 4th year at NC State. The issue is 18-22 year old americans having to compete with 28 year olds. You should have no issue with age appropriate african athletes unless your issue is specific to only "certain" foreigners.