While high school cross country has been dominating the American distance news scene lately, collegiate XC has been relatively uneventful this year. No drama, most teams not racing their A-teams yet and not a lot of interesting breakthrough teams or athletes on the scene.
Do college coaches care at all about the fans of the sport? Maybe XC national qualification needs an overhaul to make the sport more interesting. Auto qualifying for nationals from one regional race is the most boring way to run a sport possible I think.
What if we did away with regionals and used exclusively results from the regular season to determine the nationals fields? And what if we limited the field to 20 teams? Would make for a much more intriguing regular season. Teams like NAU might actually have to race all out a few times per year.