Respectful post, I like a coach that doesn\'t shy away from this stuff, but i also respect the coaches that don\'t bother with this stuff either. Either way, its fun predicting stuff.
Given that, and looking at the results, both Umass and Anchorage are looking pretty good time wise.
A question that I have is how fast are these courses. The three biggest deciders of how fast a course is can be determined by:
How hilly the course is
The temperature/weather (humid, hot, windy, raining etc.)
the condition of the course (hard ground or muddy)
Looking at the times from both schools its seems that both courses were very fast.
Anchorages top five did not go above 25 minutes, which makes me believe that this course had ideal weather conditions as well as it must have been completely flat with maybe some rolling hills. I am not trying to take anything away from them because those times are very good, but if you look at what nationals are gonna be like i would like to see how those same runners fare on a muddy hilly course.
Umass times were very impressive as but judging from the times and the overall spread of 25min runners and 26 min runners, i would say that this course was fast as well (not as fast as anchorages).
I would expect both of these teams to move up in the rankings (i haven\'t checked today if they did or not), but i would also like to see how they would fair on tougher courses aka, more hills and not such ideal conditions (the biggest factor being hills).
With that said, there is always a debate how people get ranked etc. and i could see how it would be tougher than track since all courses are different, making times more irrelevant in general.
Now i would like to ask, if those two teams move up, how far, and who will they knock out? (do some research, look at times from races run this year and previous years to see meet winning times etc. i do this every time before i post)