Portland State skips Big Sky Meet

Complete joke.

Went all distance but can't even have more than one runner at their conference meet or score one measly point.

This isn't any worse than when Arizona doesn't bother to bring an XC team to regionals every year.

And they want to be a D1 school.

Don't they have to qualify to be able to compete at Conference?

Oh, that may be why, I recall the Big Sky use to have qualifying standards for the Conference meet; that must still be the case.

How tough are the Big Sky Conference standards that PSU got one athlete in?

The Big Sky doesn't have qualifying standards for the conference meet, teams are allotted a certain number (28) of athletes per gender and can enter those athletes in any events (no time entries are allowed).

Also, some Portland State athletes competed at Portland Distance Carnival the same day as Conference.

Probably has more to do with the fact that the #8 5000m marks in the Big Sky this year are 13:40/16:16, which is ludicrous for a mid-major conference. Arguably one of the toughest distance conferences in the NCAA.

So what does this say of the conferences that have #1-#7 5000m marks.

Isn't that why you go to that conference? To compete against those top runners.

My son ran in the Big Sky this year and I am surprised some teams didn't send squads to the XC regional. Maybe this is common in all regions, but how do you get better if you don't compete? And how many recruits see this and say hell no?

Embarrassing move by Portland State. If I were a high school kid, I would steer clear of any program that isn't committed to competing in their own conference.

I can’t tell if you’re joking or what because it’s not making sense. #8 is the final points earning spot and therefore the benchmark for earning points for your team. Those 5k marks to earn only 1 point are staggering at a mid major conference. I think Portland St is committed to XC until they can do anything in track.

What about other events? Even if they opted to take distance runners to the Portland Distance meet, why did they not enter sprints/jumps/throws? They literally entered one athlete across all of the 21 events contested.

Seems PSU has literally no field athletes and essentially no sprinters. In a distance heavy, altitude benefitting schools all over, PSU made the baffling move to go all in on distance rather than field a full program where they traditionally scored effectively in past in sprints, hurdles and jumps and sometimes throws. Women were a program with at or close to full scholarship allotment so this decision to abandon other events is simply stupefying.

One thing people are forgetting about is how the athletic director views "success" for the program.

Does he want conference championships? Probably best to go sprint + field heavy then, so you avoid the NAU/SUU/MSU distance meatgrinder.

Does he want national representation? It seems to me it is much easier to buy up a sh*t ton of foreign talent or transfers to make the NCAA meet in XC. It technically only takes five people to pull it off. Those same people might also get to the NCAA meet in track someday and represent the university at that level.

I get that track is the more glamorous sport to athletic directors, but it makes way more sense to chase XC success with it requiring less overall people to obtain said success.

It could be different at PSU, but all the ADs of non P5 programs that I a familiar with use the conference meet as the primary metric for performance evaluation... individual qualifications is a bonus.

Surprised to see they are distance only, they used to be a full program:

https://www.tfrrs.org/top_performances/OR_college_f_Portland_State.html?list_hnd=3730&season_hnd=568

They should hire Jonathan Marcus

Already have, didn't go well