you are not intelligent wrote:
You just assume these guys were amazing in high school because they are good now?
Hardly an assumption. I've just looked up a lot of stats to fill in the uninformed as to how good Princeton's recruits have been. Nightingale ran 15th at FLNE as a sophomore, the top 10th grader, ahead of fellow sophs Ahmed Haji and Ben True. Any way you slice it, that's good talent. In terms of the number of guys that can do something like that (roughly top 60 in the country), it probably stacks up to about 9:13 for 3,200 ... as a 10th grader. I believe Alan Culpepper wasn't quite that fast as a sophomore.
Here are a few other recruits on Princeton's 2008 roster:
Sitler 8:53 3,200, 7th FL finals
Amirault 8:56 2M (about 8:53 for 3,200)
Soloff 9:01 2M (8:58 3,200)
Grote 9:00
Maag 8:26 3k (9:03 3,200)
Price 9:05
Tinney 9:08
Sharkey 4:15 mile, 9:12 2M (9:08-high 3,200)
Speare 9:10
Predmore 9:12
O'Toole 4:14, 9:13
Joy 9:14
Campfield 4:15 mile, 9:14
Andrews 4:07
White 4:11 mile
Average of top 10 3,200 times is 9:03-9:04.
They're landing significantly the best long distance recruits in the league. Those 3,200 times average at least 10 seconds faster than the average of the top 10 recruits of any other Ivy team. Cornell has ONE guy at 9:05 (Dannemiller) and their 10th best is probably around 9:30. A 9:05 is their best 3,200 recruit in forever and Princeton has 6 guys faster out of high school on their current roster. Yes, Princeton did win in cross and that's commendable, but OF COURSE they should dominate in cross. Look at it this way - their top 10 high school 3,200 recruits average about 14 seconds per man slower than Oregon's top 10 high school recruits, and wouldn't you expect Oregon to destroy them? Hells yeah. Of course teams have ups and downs and injuries, but with all that backup talent available, Princeton has no excuse for being beaten EMBARRASSINGLY by my alma mater in the distance events at BOTH last year's outdoor championships on their own track and this year's indoor meet. That would almost be like Oregon being outscored by Princeton in distance events at a hypothetical conference meet. Their last two conference track meets have been massive subpar performances.
On the plus side, whenever you have two sub-8s in the 3k the same year who are also All Americans, you can't be doing everything wrong, even if those guys were pretty talented in high school. Then again, Andy Miller of Cornell never broke 4:25 in high school and he could probably run 4:02 or faster if he rode the train Maag had in his 4:00 on an oversized track. He just beat Maag and probably the only kind of race Maag could beat him in would be one where others ran sub-4 ahead of both of them and dragged them along. So if you want to talk about how much a guy or two here and there have improved, for Princeton's Maag, Cornell has a Miller. For a Nightingale, there's a Smayda (1:57 high school to 1:50 college, with 29 points in individual events at conference meets). What people are knocking Princeton for is because they have far more guys who don't improve very much or at all from high school. But hey, no problemo. If they just keep getting way better recruits than the rest of the league, maybe one or two each year will pan out and they'll get the occasional diamond in the rough, then they'll have enough to make a conference champion cross team, so it doesn't matter if they aren't really improving people on average. So it's like the more nuts you put in the yard, the more of them a blind squirrel can find.
Not really trying to bash Princeton too much to make a plug for my former team. Princeton is doing alright in cross and have a few guys putting up great track times. They're doing some good things, but CU is doing a shitload better with the level of recruits they have and the recent results bear that out. All of their mid distance guys made their finals and all but one scored, that guy missing by one spot. And they outscored Princeton in the mile and the 5k despite Princeton's loaded roster. Hine kind of lucked out by not having to face Nightingale or Maag in the 5k, but first is first, so screw 'em. The rest of the guys in the field would have loved to have won and they didn't, so if anybody thinks it was a weak event, it wasn't Hine's fault. And the way Princeton was running at that meet, Hine might have hung in there and made a race of it even if Nightingale and Maag had been in it. 14:25 might not sound that impressive, but to do that in Barton with the last 8 laps completely solo in 4:25 is not bad at all. He's a worthy champion and so is the whole CU team. They brought their A+ game to the meet. Congrats guys.