#2 Ok State men BEAT DOWN #1 Iowa St, #5 Colorado & #7 BYU at Big 12s. Wow what a performance.

If only everyone cared about conference champs universally, but those days are long gone.

All the top finishers were from Africa.

Ryan Schoppe, known African.

Very very impressive.

Notes-

1. Great race for OSU

2. The top 8 were all kicking together, insane

3. OSU with Mid Distance guys at 4-5. Can they hold up to 10k (yeah they for sure will)

4. ISU still ran really well, maybe will be better with the extra 5:30 mins racing.

5. Jane H could score for the majority of men’s teams nose breathing

Foreign athletes comprised 13 of the top 15, 20 of the top 30, and 26 of the top 50. I don’t know why there would be much domestic interest in the men’s race. 7th place and 15th were US. If you take all the top US athletes in the race they score 76 as a team. Ten of the top 14 were Kenyans.

Get better? Crying about where your opponent is from is for losers.

Can someone give a good explanation why the Big 12 and SEC are loaded with Kenyans but the Big 10 isn't?

I’d presume weather has a lot to do with it.

After this race did anyone have to pee in a cup 🍵

Other than Utah and Colorado, top US athletes don’t want to go train in places like Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, Texas, etc. A meet like this is far less meaningful as a consumer of XC than state HS championships, NXR meets or NXN.

Mf Ryan Schoppe is unc out there. Better get on LinkedIn and start networking. You can’t live in a sh****** with your pals your whole life. Dudes a dinosaur

How are those places different than Indiana, Pennsylvania, Illinois, Ohio, Wisconsin, Michigan?

All has to do with recruiting. In general top American high school distance runners will not go to SEC schools.

Southeast is warm, humid and flat, academics not as renowned, and less distance running tradition (exception Arkansas).

So if coach wants to win, they either have to recruit second tier Americans and hope to 'coach them up', or bring in Internationals.

The third option is money. A top US recruit may switch from Washington to Auburn in SEC, if Auburn offered scholarship plus $500k cash.

This does not happen yet though, since running is not a major sport. It is, however, the secret to schools like Indiana and Texas Tech suddenly improving in football.

Do you really think that 4 of the best teams in the nation, running full rosters, is less meaningful than some random high school state meet?

So OSU destroyed a team that just got caught systematically doping. That’s all that needs to be said.

The poster's point is that for NXN etc, or a traditional US based ncaa team, we get invested as fans in knowing the backstory of the athletes, and understanding the system they developed in.

A team full of 26 yr old International freshmen means I don't know much about them, or how they trained and grew up.

I also will be more interested this year in NXN and BrooksLocker than I was in Big12 and SEC xc meets.

I started to tune out of college XC after getting hyped for big meets only to see some of the best teams tempo run and even sometimes laugh their way through it. If the runners don't care, why should I? And it takes away the achievements from the others who are trying. What is a top 10 worth when it looks half the runners that can beat you treat this race like its meaningless?

Then when the best teams starting treating conference champs with no interest, I completely gave up. I need some sort of "regular season" and playoffs to get interested and familiar with the top runners. As a fan, I am not going to try to prepare for just one race all year, and study all the possible runners, and how they might run if they were running well. Heck, many of them won't show up at finals, or not really fit, because of injuries they have been silent on. Without some heavily contested events before, I can't get interested in the finals.

High School cross country is so much better. The teams race a lot, and they race hard. Not just nationals, but even state finals in the states you are familiar with are really interesting. And the big regular season meets are still contested with best efforts.

I understand the counter argument. The coaches know the best strategy is to race very rarely, and peak for just the end, because that's all the results anyone cares about. Well, the results of that is that the "sport" doesn't even need to exist from a fan's perspective. I am a lifelong runner who really wants to be interested in college XC (and was before), but the current situation where so few races involve top teams going all-out, head-to-head has driven me and I'm sure many other potential fans away. Every AD should be looking to cut this useless sport. If the best way for a coach to run a team is a treat the whole regular season with no interest, then no one else should have any interest. And you should learn in college to manage your time, and stop doing pointless exercises.

Really good run by Tayvon Kitchen. I’m also impressed that Messaoudi is running so well after just competing in Tokyo.

Yes. Because I have been able to watch them progress through middle school and into high school. Watching unknown foreigners, many of whom are far older doesn’t hold the same appeal.