And this year? Last year they were all brand new, straight off the altitude training grounds of the Kenyan highlands. They were imported ready! A year later that super team places 8th. How do you mess up a team full of professional Kenyans?
Yea but don’t forget he also won 6 national titles in 7 years lol. Not to mention he did so by developing all those you mention straight out of high school. Abdi Nur went from a 9:20 guy to a national senior champion and an Olympian. Mike Smith did that! Yea he gets a pass.
And this year? Last year they were all brand new, straight off the altitude training grounds of the Kenyan highlands. They were imported ready! A year later that super team places 8th. How do you mess up a team full of professional Kenyans?
This year they didn’t run as well. The history of Dave Smith’s career proves this thread absurd.
Yea but don’t forget he also won 6 national titles in 7 years lol. Not to mention he did so by developing all those you mention straight out of high school. Abdi Nur went from a 9:20 guy to a national senior champion and an Olympian. Mike Smith did that! Yea he gets a pass.
Lol.
You’re a bit bias I see you posting about big sky athletes all the time.
Throwback to you posting about June Eastwood racing and you having “a video” to show the hating fans. I raced against those NAU golden years teams, that 2019 XC choke was horrendous.
Nobody expected them to lose that race. Pretty comparable to OSU today, yet OSU never showed their expected form this year.
That wasn’t on Smith, that was on the guys racing. There’s no pass for that. That’s just a fact of NCAA XC.
Does Cole Hocker, Josh Kerr, Yared Nuguse, Geordie Beamish, and Oli Hoare get a pass for having me beat them in XC? No.
I remember you were also the racist dude last year when OSU won.
BYU woman had the pieces to contend last year and finished 14th.
Couple of crazy occurrences, NCAA XC is so unpredictable.
I bring this up because I think someone did the math, and if BYU W would have ran the same times at nationals last year as they did on the course earlier in the year they would have won.
I know times and circumstances change, but still it was the same course. Crazy the variance there.
These Championships were a perfect example of overcoaching. I think sometimes xc coaches try to outsmart everybody else strategically and it ends up blowing up in their face like it did for Oklahoma State. If you tell your team to go out super'l-conservative you run the risk of not being able to get back in the race because you buried yourself too much early, which is exactly what happened.
That being said, I would hesitate to call him a bad coach. Recruiting is one of the aspects of being a good college coach. You can't win if you don't have the ponies for it.
Yeah he isn’t a bad coach, he’s had all Americans and national champs from the US and Europe as well.
From the outside, OSU didn’t leave campus until Big 12s. They stomped New Mexico and Oregon at their home meet early on. Maybe the guys got over cooked in training.
Lots of talent pushing each other every day May have left them flat. Combine that with bad positioning at 2k, and a fall. Looks like they had a bad day and it spiraled.
It seems like they never leave campus to race in the fall, sometimes it helps break up the training to travel and get a hard effort in with deep competition. Make sure the guys know how to get out and such