Top 500 NCAA Outdoor 5000m times (men) since 2015

It sure helps to have extra eligibility. Of the top 100 men's outdoor times, 33 of them shouldn't be in the NCAA anymore. Not everyone is using that extra year of eligibility, but just about anyone who is one of the best on their team is going to stay that extra year of competition. Some teams have multiple good runners still competing who would normally be out of the system, so we're talking 100-200 good distance runners still out there when they normally wouldn't. This will keep happening until 2025 since 2021 didn't count as eligibility for incoming freshmen either. So let's take another look at these numbers in 2026/2027.

Looking at the 10,000 from this year compared 2019, if you take out the seniors this year the 100th best runner is 29:22. In 2019 the 100th best runner was 29:33. It's reasonable that there is a little bit more depth as time goes on, so 3 years later having the 100th best 10k change by 11 seconds is not ridiculous. Shoes aren't making nearly as much of an impact as people think. It's largely because of the extra eligibility, as well as the fact that as time goes on there are more good runners, more depth, and with more depth you have more competitive races for people to run fast. There's no longer one or two races during the season where people can put up a good time, there are people running fast in tons of races which drags more runners to fast times.