NCAA Cross Country is RUINED - Teams like Florida Women, OSU and New Mexico ruin NCAA Cross Country

Same pathetic coaches just buying old athletes and support cheating!

While I certainly agree to some extent. We get this argument across sports. Remember when Calipari was ruining college basketball with the One-and-dones? Same argument. No longer about building skills and developing teams, its about assembling a roster. Same with the portal in college football now. And I agree. Now to complete in cross, you almost have to bring in foreigners. Football you can't compete if you aren't active in the portal. Basketball has the portal and the one-and-dones.

What really sucks for cross is that so many of these guys are so much older and basically pros. A bunch of these guys have made money doing road races that SHOULD make them ineligible for college athletics.

You see this pattern across every NCAA sport when the system shifts from developing athletes to assembling rosters, the long-term health of American talent gets hurt. it’s the heavy reliance on older, already developed international athletes who often arrive with near professional experience.
None of this is the athletes’ fault. The real problem is that this model leaves very little room for true American development. When coaches fill their top five with athletes who are 24–26 years old and have already competed at a near-pro level — sometimes even earning prize money on the roads, the NCAA stops functioning as a developmental pipeline and becomes more of a results-shopping platform. Younger U.S. runners lose opportunities to mature, race big meets, and gain the kind of experience they need to succeed at the next level.
The coaches who rely on this model end up hurting American distance development because they aren’t building anything, they’re importing finished products to win right now. It’s short term success at the expense of the bigger picture. If the NCAA actually wants to grow the sport domestically, it needs coaches committed to identifying talent, coaching it, and investing in long term growth instead of bypassing the process altogether. The coaches at Florida, OSU and U of NM are small minded and hurt American distance running at the expense of an easy win

I wholesale reject the notion that an American trying to win a NATIONAL Championship has to beat the best athletes from every country IN THE WORLD.

Good news - they don’t.

I know it's not just Kenyans but there was NEVER the carrying on about this before there were Kenyans. Villanova ,Providence, and East Tennessee were always loaded with Irishmen as well as the occasional Brit or Kiwi as was Arkansas later on. No one complained that Nick Rose and company were ruining NCAA cross country when they were at Western Kentucky. I looked at LaSalle's roster. Ten of the fourteen runners are foreign, all western countries, and I don't see any complaints.

This all seems to me whiny and maybe a bit racist that we've decided it's a problem when the international athletes are Kenyans. And personally I think it makes the sport better because our kids get better competition. UTEP was pretty much all Kenyans for many years. Ed Eyestone once said something like he was prepared for any field he raced against in his prime because the competition was never any tougher than he faced in BYU's dual meets with UTEP.

Fan turnout is not important to anyone making any decisions about who to recruit. Wouldn't even be on the radar. Sucks.

College Coaches Try to Recruit The best Athletes Possible, But there Job is Still to Develop Them. They (Coaches and The Athletes Set Short and Long Goals) They need to win their Conference and NCAA or come close, The longer a Coach goes without winning an NCAA Title The More The Pressure Builds They Were putting lots of Pressure on my friend/former teamate (Who did lead His team to 5 NCAA Titles) He Mentioned They fired his first College Coach (Tom Chesbro Who has won 1 NCAA Title) because He kept coming in 2nd, He Had just led the Team to 2nd place as a Team, and he is fired a few days later. (The Pressure is Enormous on Coaches if they Don't Lead the School To an NCAA Title) So Hell yes they try to develop Athletes, Extremely Few can win NCAA off of the ability they had as High Schoolers (There are rare Exceptions.

You're assuming the worst of folks instead of being curious about their position.

I can get behind capping international scholarships to 20%, but making scholarships American only seems short-sighted to me. Frankly, I want the best talent in the world to come here and become American. We can do that and support native-born Americans at the same time.

Meb, Lagat, Lomong. None were US citizens when they enrolled in college. Edward Cheserek was actively pursuing his citizenship when he started college. These athletes did/would have represented America well, and it's undeniable that they pushed other Americans to perform better.

If we expanded this "American only" mentality across the board it would damage our ability to be the most powerful country in the world. Google "inventions by US immigrants" and you'll see that America wouldn't be nearly successful as it is if we didn't open the door to the best and brightest around the world.

Perhaps some are doping, however most are also about 115 pounds, and are lucky to eat meat three times per year!

Would you say the same about graduate assistantship? That would be a perfect recipe for losing our edge in STEM.

This is a huge concern. Palmer doesn’t actually coach those older foreign athletes and his PED history is disturbing

But let’s also be honest: all this talk about “pressure” doesn’t mean track and cross country coaches deserve the same criticism people give football or basketball coaches who make millions. Most distance coaches are underpaid, overworked, and expected to perform miracles without the financial resources those revenue sport coaches get. Blaming them the same way is misguided, totally different world, totally different expectations. Palmer cheats because he’s a weird dude

The problem with a Darren Gauson, Will Palmer and Dave Smith the NCAA isn’t complicated they don’t actually develop athletes, they just scoop up older post collegiate runners from overseas and pretend it’s coaching. They are not respected for their coaching one bit!

Some of you don't seem to understand economics. These coaches hsve all had the same number of scholarships to work with. And equivalent f9reigners typically cost more than Americans.

I know there's a doping problem in Kenya, but athletes in NCAA are in the U.S., at universities. Just how would they be doping without the knowledge of their coaches/teammates? And drugs aren't free; where would they be getting the money? Also, they've already won the most important thing: They are scholarship students at a U.S. university - what need would they have to dope to improve their position a couple places?

These programs aren’t coaching, they’re shopping. OSU, Florida,New Mexico and Oregon… it’s the same formula: grab a bunch of 23–25-year-olds who were basically pros already, throw on a singlet, and pretend it’s development. It’s lazy, it’s culture killing, and it turns the NCAA into a bargain bin talent hunt instead of an actual coaching competition. They are also paying $$$ to these athlete NIL

Do we really need so many threads on this one topic?

NIL money, revenue sharing from schools, pro contracts, qualifying for Olympic teams.......There is plenty of incentive.