d3 xc nationals predictions

Ah yeah, should have checked that more carefully. At least Wartburg vs Chicago should be interesting - I heard (not sure if its true) Chicago will be adding Maddie Kelly back in, think it'll be a really competitive race.

I don't know what JHU thinks they are getting out of that Virginia meet. At this point in the season, I think their runners would benefit more from fields closer to what they will see at the national meet, i.e. fields where their top 5 can be in the top 50. They got mostly buried on both sides, idk how helpful preparation that will be.

Just realized the race at auggie is already over - Chicago beat Wartburg by 3 points. With that finish, I think the nationals field looks pretty open between the top 4 teams, with maybe a small edge for Geneseo and Chicago.

Results from Rowan are out as well - Geneseo barely scraped by Carleton 37-38 (!) on the women's side. They might have been holding back or not running a full squad, but definitely closer than I expected that race would be.

MIT over St Olaf by a ways with Williams and Amherst pretty close behind.

PP men dominate Augustana. Nothing going to stop them.

Women's race @ Connecticut

Take out their top two guys and Pomona still wins. No other team can do that.

Also, a couple of top 7ish PP guys ran at UC Riverside today. They are super deep. How do the Augustana and Conn College Invite courses compare? Just comparing times, runners 3-7 at MIT and Williams can’t hold a candle to the back of the PP pack. Today PP had all seven in the top 20 and 1-7 the spread was only around 20 seconds. That’s awesome!

Maybe they wanted to meet Hicham El Guerrouj?

I’m pretty sure Auggie is short, the times are just too consistently fast - really reminiscent of the 2017 regional meet there. They changed the course since then and it seemed reasonable for the past couple years, but I’m guessing this year they changed it again and it wound up back to being short.

Still think PP is better than MIT (not to mentions Williams), but I don’t think you should be taking times from this Auggie course at face value.

Just because a meet is fast doesn’t inherently mean it’s short. The same discussions were had after Paul Short two weeks ago. Augustana is extremely flat, and on a manicured golf course. Call it short if you wheel it out and it comes up short. Otherwise, speculation is unnecessary. Everyone ran on the same course.

It wasn't short, everyone got GPS 4.99 to 5.05 and an 8k is 4.97. No one ran crazy fast up front, Collet only ran a PR of 15 sec with a huge pack up front. The PP guys were just a little faster than their other races. It was 50 degrees, almost no wind, with short quick little golf course rolls and long straights. Who knew NCC could pull that off?

You heard it here first from this dude, the course was actually long.

Pomona-Pitzer men ran a team time of 2:00:14 (24:02avg) at the Augustana Invitational this morning, is this a D3 National record?

Williams is well known to be a grade inflating degree mill. The vast majority of their athletes pursue joke liberal arts majors. It does not hold a candle to strong, DI state schools like Michigan, Berkely, Georgia Tech, etc.

You’re joking, right? Job placement from Williams at HF is near the best, per capita. Most people haven’t heard of it, but the people that matter do.

Not even a course record - NCC averaged 23:45 at Auggie at the Midwest regional in 2017.

Surely I can’t be the only one who thinks it’s suspect that everyone is running 30-40 seconds faster here than last year? The conditions at this meet were good last year the field was of similar quality.

No, I'm saying it was accurate, GPS tends to overestimate. If anything it's about 0 - 25m short, which is about as perfect as you can get.

I was at the Augustana meet spectating- same course its been in the past. Perfect weather, hard ground, no wind, and the pack went out in 4:43 vs. 4:55 last year. Times are very impressive but more a product of perfect weather and guys getting after it from the start. As nice as it looks, still doesn't change much in the grand scheme of things, times don't matter in cross country. No one questioned how fast Lousivillle was last year when nationals was historically fast.