Wondered the same thing. Flotrack used to be like college football gameday and travel every weekend to big meets (and film workouts and interviews with the host school).
It’s certainly not the whole B team, holding out top guys as an issue. This is only a factor with a handful of the top schools who have depth. Otherwise, plenty of good schools have guys who are legitimately injured. There are head-to-head points for nationals at stake right now that teams can’t afford to hold out folks intentionally.
Runnerspace seems to be doing the Nuttycombe every year now....probably biggest race outside of the championship
Why not Piane last week? They did some other one with much less talent? And Notre Dame athletic department doesn't own a few decent cameras and have some aspiring broadcasting students that might want to do a little filming? I mean seriously in a school that size they can not put something together
It makes no sense. XC should be as well covered as an Alabama football game. They have proven the ability to cover college sports and the same level of production should be out into XC as football and basketball.
It makes no sense. XC should be as well covered as an Alabama football game. They have proven the ability to cover college sports and the same level of production should be out into XC as football and basketball.
or field hockey...do you how many field hockey games were streamed by espn on Friday?
xc is my favorite sport even over basketball and track but in college they don't truly race until nationals. I am more entertained following the highschool scene than college.
Big Ten Network should be all over Nuttycombe, Griak, Piane and other B1G meets, ESPN should do the same.
Imagine having multiple top 20 football teams on your campus on one day, network officials would hyperventilate and the announcers would start making out with each other .... which is pretty much what they do every Saturday anyway.
Big Ten Network should be all over Nuttycombe, Griak, Piane and other B1G meets, ESPN should do the same.
Imagine having multiple top 20 football teams on your campus on one day, network officials would hyperventilate and the announcers would start making out with each other .... which is pretty much what they do every Saturday anyway.
or maybe ESPN/ACCNX (ND is an ACC school)...but ESPN could use as lead in to the Championship.
- Media can't be confident that it'll be an honest contest with coaches sandbagging and running B teams. I think this is a legitimate issue and so personnel and money won't be devoted to an unpredictable product
- Fans suffer the same in-person as the above reason and probably can't be bothered to pay if they don't know if they're going to get an actual race
- Nobody demands it of their sports information departments. Coaches are often too busy running their own home meets to worry about these "details." It shouldn't be requested. It shouldn't be asked for. It has to be demanded by coaches of their sports info people. They're fully capable of doing it.
- Coaches or the USTFCCCA need to put some kind of "best practices" together for sports info depts to follow. Take the guesswork out of it and just tell them how to best broadcast a cross country meet. Live stream with steadicam from the back of a golf cart is a minimum. Stay close enough to read the bib numbers. If you can integrate in live results on the side with periodic individual and team standings, even better. If you can get commentators plugged in, great! Have a static camera at the finish line to show people coming across. That's it! An intern with modern cell phone can do this, honestly.
- The sport itself doesn't have a good following. This becomes a chicken-and-egg situation really quickly but more coverage will help grow the sport's following. Larger fan base will push coverage to improve. Fanbase then increases further. Etc. Etc. We're just stuck in a death spiral at the bottom and zero momentum. Either the fanbase needs to be more vocal directly to people that can make a difference or the people in charge need to just do a better job.
- In the NCAA system, there are no consequences for bad races. Only good races. But even then you don't know until November if it was a good race or not.
- The sport's structure makes zero sense to the casual fan. Who outside of the most hardcore xc fans and people actually paid to coach the sport have any idea how people even qualify for NCAAs?? I have no idea how we expect people to follow the sport. People won't care if it's broadcast or not because they don't know what's even going on
I would say that, although this seems like it should be simple enough, they are not even close to this yet. But a bare minimum should be to have a good recording of each race done and placed on YouTube shortly after.
Seriously, you had two of the countries top contenders head-to-head....and nothing to show for it. Tuohy gets tremendous views on her videos...the XC/T&F community should be demanding these videos for all events as a condition of hosting.
The Cowboy jamboree was excellent quality...not many different views, but at least it had the leaders throughout.
But I also agree that XC does itself no favors...nobody knew until race time which runners were actually racing...and by not having some standard or incentive for events, it's hard to get excited about anything until late season.