Wasn’t the guy that did it a math grad student at WashU? I assumed that this was a project for his studies and that he has finished his studies and moved on.
College xc really doesn't provide the meaningful data points to make precise and accurate championship predictions, with teams running so few times per season and the top people probably only running all out once at the end of the season, so there was always going to be some fuzziness in even the brightest, well-schooled former runner's mathematical model.
College xc really doesn't provide the meaningful data points to make precise and accurate championship predictions, with teams running so few times per season and the top people probably only running all out once at the end of the season, so there was always going to be some fuzziness in even the brightest, well-schooled former runner's mathematical model.
Right, he did start weighing the results somewhat but still picking the right races can be somewhat arbitrary and probably difficult to apply for the thousands of runners to get the best assessment.
Hey guys. Its not dead. I'm going to start updating the website again this or next week. I just taught a large-ish class this summer and have a lot of grading to do.
In defense of the individual rankings, I do capture a simulation of the race before I load results in:
The arrows show how off the simulation was. Blanks was ranked 5th and got 1st. If you only care about who is going to win, I agree human rankings are likely more accurate because top runners rarely run all-out. However, LACCTiCs goal is to accurately rank the entire race, and the entirety of NCAA. Its pretty good at predicting finishing places of people in the middle pack, especially when you consider how dense the field is (a few seconds is 20-30 places). This is also why the team predictions are so good, because humans can rarely predict how a change in the depth of the field will affect a team's performance.
In the 2024 Cross-country season LAACTIC was uncannily accurate, as much as could be expected, and more, for the top Div I Women. This was proven out by the post-season results at BYU.
The accuracy was crazy. At the time, the program was saying Valby was in sub-15min shape. And then, boom, sure enough, Valby went sub-15 soon thereafter.
TFRRS has put up new security that is blocking my requests to scrape data. Until I find a way around it, LACCTiC cannot be updated. It appears that the owners of TFRRS are not happy that I was using "their" data
Not sure if this makes me a commie or what, but I hate the idea that race results can be kept as trade secrets or IP. USATF should mandate that all race results be open source data and tell timing sites to find other ways to make their money - like offering compelling presentations and interpretations of the data.
Not sure if this makes me a commie or what, but I hate the idea that race results can be kept as trade secrets or IP. USATF should mandate that all race results be open source data and tell timing sites to find other ways to make their money - like offering compelling presentations and interpretations of the data.
Now Meylan has a note up that he can’t easily pull race results from a lot of places around the country any more so he won’t be speed rating nearly as many races.
Not sure if this makes me a commie or what, but I hate the idea that race results can be kept as trade secrets or IP. USATF should mandate that all race results be open source data and tell timing sites to find other ways to make their money - like offering compelling presentations and interpretations of the data.
Now Meylan has a note up that he can’t easily pull race results from a lot of places around the country any more so he won’t be speed rating nearly as many races.
FloSports Secures Long-Term Extensions for DirectAthletics and TFRRS to Continue to Serve as Official Results and Rankings Platform for the NAIA and NJCAA.