Many top guys ran 45 seconds slower yesterday.
Many top guys ran 45 seconds slower yesterday.
Individual rankings
Team rankings:
These rankings are a mess.
What would you change?
I like the ones that were posted above. Here are the teams.
I think these and the individual top 10 from this twitter have a few issues. Ankeny below Urbandale? No way—one is probably top 5 more often than not, and the other probably isn’t top 10. Johnston also finished 9th among 4A teams at the Bobcat Invite, and ran 3200m time trials instead of racing the Heartland Classic, so 5th seems strangely generous. Individually, I’m probably a little big-school-biased, but does someone want to explain how Landon Bendgen is ranked ahead of Natnael Kifle? Kifle was (slightly) closer to Juan Gonzalez at Augustana than Zuber was at Heartland; as another point of comparison he beat Wes Pleskac by 40 seconds at Augustana, a margin that would put him at 15:09 at Heartland. Zuber, Merrick and Kifle should be the top 3. Ethan Eichhorn seems like a criminal omission: he definitely deserves to be ranked ahead of VanderWaal. They also misspelled two kids’ names which kinda makes it seem like amateur hour.
To be fair the IATC rankings have had their fair share of spelling errors, too. Though they seem to get corrected over time. A few persist in last week's 4a girls list still. Does anyone know who is behind the "Everything Iowa XC TF" Twitter? Is it just one dude's opinion? At least with the IATC rankings you know it's coming from a group of coaches.
IATC has input from several coaches but ultimately is made by 1 coach.
Johnston won the Pleasant Valley meet putting 4 ahead of Pleasant Valley's 1st. They one off meet at Marshalltown and are now 10th while PV is 4th? No. IATC rankings are off.
Verde ran 10:40 for 2 miles this week and is unranked. There are 2 or 3 girls capable of 10:40 in all classes.
You’re hitting on the problem with the IATC rankings, which is that they’re too fickle, so to speak, based on the results of a single most recent race. For example, if a kid (A) consistently runs 15:40s for 5 meets and then has one bad race where he’s pipped by a kid (B) he’s routinely been beating by 30+ seconds, that doesn’t mean kid B has to be ranked ahead of kid A, until it becomes a pattern. There’s likely to be a regression to the mean. The same goes for teams if they have one subpar result because they’re missing a couple of their scorers.
PV proving the #4 Ranking + Tiea Back for ICW
I don't know if PV is better than Kennedy. They lost to them in their only meeting..
So which team is better now?
Cedar Falls or Dowling Catholic?
How would Cedar Falls done at Griak?
I think the Cedar Falls team that ran yesterday would have finished 5th.
Cedar Falls IMO. I think they’d have finished 2nd at Griak, ahead of Dowling.
Here some mind blowing stats. Hensley and McClinton are ranked 5th and 7th. Dowling had 2 in front of both. Blake Smith is ranked 10th. Dowling put 4 in front of him.
Cedar Falls