Why should anyone care about the time spread of top 5 runners in XC?

Strong 3-4-5 (and even 6-7) is more important than stud up front.

time gap is not inherently important in its own right, it is merely an off-the-cuff measure of how strong 3-4-5 are.

You are an idiot.

no. i understand scoring, and pushing.

do you need it explained to you?

Having a 5th man who is consistently running well is really just another way of saying that you have a small spread. The closer your fifth man is to your first, the smaller your spread will be. When you came in 75th, your team had a large spread. When you came in 40th, your team had a small spread.

In my experience, teams that pack well in the top quarter to third of the race have more success than teams with one or two studs. I have seen teams take first and second in a race and get beat by a team that puts everyone between 20th and 30th.

I think it was in a community college race in California but one time a school (I think it was Riverside CC) went 1-2-3-4 in the state meet and the number 5 was 74th (again something like that...). They ended up winning by a point or two.

Another team I remember didn't have an up front runner but would pack 6 runners within 15 second of each other. They had all 6 runners in the top 14 at conference and ended up winning. It all depends on how the other teams are proportioned.

If the 5th man consistently takes 100th, it doesn't matter that he's consistent. It matters that he's close to your best guy, assuming your best guy is pretty good.

the team with the fastest 5th man wins like 90% of races. so obviously that means the team with a small spread.

I think having 5 good guys is very important. Like good enough to go 1-2-3-4-5 in a meet. That would help out the team's score a TON!

I would say that coaches care so much about the spread because it reflects how good their training program is. If you have 5 guys all right next to each other AND at the top of races, then you must be a good coach and have a sound program.

Spread should always be coupled with average time. The spread quotient is meant to balance the misleading nature of average time in cross country. Every year, in virtually every state, a team with a slower average time wins a state meet. That team likely had a much better spread. So, the two should always be quoted together i.e. "my high school xc team averaged 15:55 with a :42 spread." That team would almost always beat a team who says "my high school xc team averaged 15:52 with a 1:39 spread." The idea, as someone pointed out, is that front runners do not add a lot of points when they have an off race. However, in every race, there is a point where the pack starts rolling in and five seconds can literally mean 20 points.

we lost state champions to other hs by 1 points. my teammate is leader, he should had won state but he end up 3rd place cost us 2point lost to other highschool team by 1pt! If he won state, we would have won state. We end up 3 (15:11),4 (15:12),5 (15:17),35 (16:29),54 (16:44)= 101pts.

Average time coupled with spread are inseparable. Improvement to spread or average doesn't mean improvement without maintaining the other variable.

Spread has always been to me a code word for pack running as a team. Get your 5 top runners to run their best on race day and I wouldn't care what their spread is.

^maybe if you would have passed a couple guys you would have won. don't blame it on a guy that ran better than you.

just for a personal example:

my senior year our spread was from 1-5 was 39 seconds. We lost to a team who's spread was 111 seconds by 4 points. i was first for our team, 8th overall. They had the state champion who won the race by 30 seconds.

Um...5th place was 54th. Don't you think it would have been easier to pass back in the pack then up front?

lincoln wrote:

we lost state champions to other hs by 1 points. my teammate is leader, he should had won state but he end up 3rd place cost us 2point lost to other highschool team by 1pt! If he won state, we would have won state. We end up 3 (15:11),4 (15:12),5 (15:17),35 (16:29),54 (16:44)= 101pts.

Why do you say that he "should have won"? Maybe the guy who came in 54th should have come in 52nd. Maybe you should have come in two places higher. You didn't lose because your front runner didn't win. You lost because the team as a whole (including you) had one more point than the team that won. But I guess you should do whatever you can to place the blame on someone else.

in the dont know wrote:

I would say that coaches care so much about the spread because it reflects how good their training program is. If you have 5 guys all right next to each other AND at the top of races, then you must be a good coach and have a sound program.

Not really. Talent is the biggest determinant, if you have all your top 5 guys running within 10 seconds of each other, it is extremely likely are some of them are not running to their ability.

People have brought up some good points, including the OP: the actual spread is pretty meaningless, especially if you have a good #1 man. If he wins the meet by 35 seconds and the #5 is 2:30 back, it wouldn't have mattered if the spread was 2:00 or 3:30, team scores would have been the same. And the spread says nothing about what the #2-4 guys are doing. ON AVERAGE, better teams will have smaller spreads, thanks in part to heteroskedasticity of times and also due to the fact better teams will have more good runners competing for those spots. A good college team will have most guys running 24's or 25's for 8k, you're not gonna see the #5-7 guys drop 28:30. A crappy HS team will have guys all over the board, going from 15's to 19's perhaps. The more competitive the team, the less likely there's gonna be a guy who runs a shitty race.

I like what coach Wetmore said about this in his post-NCAA Championship flocast interview...he talked about "5 guys running against the mass" or something like that and not necessarily the importance of a tight grouping....

Is ure agree with guy who talked about the importance of a strong 3-4-5 group and sometimes it's hard for the boys to appreciate that.