Reason #1 of why track/xc will never be as popular as team sports: #1 Oklahoma State was just 10th at Pre Nats

People aren't just "assuming" that Ok St held out their top guys. People can read the team and individual entries at the meet website (posted before the race) that show their top guys were not entered.

Does raise the question of why bother entering pre-nats if you are not going to take advantage of the opportunity to gain course familiarity by your scoring runners.

But Ok St is good enough to win any which way and, if you win, no one can really question what you do.

backkick wrote:

People aren't just "assuming" that Ok St held out their top guys. People can read the team and individual entries at the meet website (posted before the race) that show their top guys were not entered.

So you confirmed my original post. Can you imagine if Texas A&M didn't play Johnny Manziel against Alabama simpy because it was a regular season game?

Of course not.

I've got nothing against Oklahoma State. At Cornell, we often ran meets with our B team.

I just was reminded of this part of our sport today when I saw that result and when I've spent an hour waiting to figure out what the score is in WIsconsin.

I'd like dual meets to mean more again, but the only rule change that could allow that to happen would be to double the 18 and 12.5 scholarship limits.

You'd need enough athletes to have a strong B team to compete the dual meets and still leave the studs rested to make big efforts at the regional and national championships.

As it is, local rivalries mean very little when the big guns take conference championships off, preparing for regionals and the jump to 10k distance for the men.

On the other hand, regional meets and nationals are a KICK IN THE PANTS to watch, because everyone brings their A game.

In the end, this train of thought makes me like the push/pull method of qualifying more. It makes mid-season races more significant, even if they require fans to think like actuaries to calculate the impact of Iona beating Stanford.

Rojo I generally agree with everything you're saying here, despite your characteristically atrocious prose.

However, I feel there are some aspects about cross country competition that make it especially, even uniquely, difficult to attract the same sort of fans as team sports--and chief among them is the impossibility of fully covering, in real time, each aspect of the team dynamic that occurs within a competitive cross country race. Via Flotrack Pro, just watched the Wisco races, and while I of course want to know who's going to win the race, it's the mid-pack stuff that's actually most interesting me--but that's so, so hard to catch on film. More often than not, what you get beyond the top runners is simply a mass of college athletes running by for a few seconds before the camera returns to the leaders. By only focusing on the leaders, what this sort of coverage does is effectively force the viewer only to care about the race from an individual (rather than a team) perspective.

It doesn't seem to me that regular season track competition suffers from quite this same problem. While people rightly complain about, say, all Nike athletes running in the same uniforms regardless of identity or nationality, or other aspects of track coverage, it's nevertheless the case in track that, because athletes are visible from any point in the stadium rather than going down a trail into the woods, you can generally focus on a given athlete much easier and thus have a better chance to appreciate his/her performance. The fact that athletes are running around the track multiple times, in other words, makes it much easier to engage and appreciate the sport than cross country, the very nature of which forces a one-dimensional coverage that suppresses some of the very exciting team dynamics.

rojo wrote:

So you confirmed my original post. Can you imagine if Texas A&M didn't play Johnny Manziel against Alabama simpy because it was a regular season game?

Only two teams compete in the national championships. If rankings were used to pare down which two teams could qualify for the national championships, and a single loss could potentially end your campaign, then I would think you would see the teams' top entrants competing much more frequently.

Koppenberg wrote:

You'd need enough athletes to have a strong B team to compete the dual meets and still leave the studs rested to make big efforts at the regional and national championships.

One hard race per week should not tire you out or ruin your season. Runners need to toughen up.

In response to your Reason #2 - I think technology could soon address this. Put GPS chips in the bibs, write a simple program, and suddenly you can have an on-screen graphic, updating in real time, showing all the team scores. For those watching in person, make it an app they can have running on their phone. Imagine watching a race with that in effect. You'd be making predictions mid-race about how the scores will change by the end of the race, based on what you know about certain teams, or how the runners look. You'd be able to really see how strategies and tactics are employed in a XC race. These are the kinds of things that make a sport interesting.

I went to watch the Wisco meet today, and they had a giant scoreboard with team scores constantly updating. Everyone there knew who won and the top 20 teams

Perhaps race officials should implement some level of technology beyond popsickle sticks... (same goes for track meets).

Finish line officials should have the equivalent of a "Fed-Ex package check" tablet with them so that placement scoring can be tabulated easier and disseminated. Doesn't sound like too hard an app...

Admittedly, I don't know much about what happens behind the scenes though. I'm always a bit perplexed by the ~hour delay in result-posting at your local, electronic-timed, 5k.

How is it that one day everyone is talking about how detrimental a full collegiate xc/track career can be for guy's long term prospects and today people are demanding all the top teams race all their top guys...?

Also, the team comparison is difficult because, even in xc, it still comes down, acutely, to individual performance. The comparison should be to individual sports (tennis/golf/nascar).

krispy kremlin wrote:

Perhaps race officials should implement some level of technology beyond popsickle sticks... (same goes for track meets).

Finish line officials should have the equivalent of a "Fed-Ex package check" tablet with them so that placement scoring can be tabulated easier and disseminated. Doesn't sound like too hard an app...

Admittedly, I don't know much about what happens behind the scenes though. I'm always a bit perplexed by the ~hour delay in result-posting at your local, electronic-timed, 5k.

It's not usually an hour, but yeah, at least 15-20mins id say

What about F1 its on tv all the time and most people will just glance at it get bored and swtich over. A lot will just watch whatever crap is on if they put it on TV people will wathc

but you are right you will never match a team sport and he following takes decades to build up. Fans don#t give a crap about how good the game is they just want their team to win thinking that they are actually winning to. They are not

Athletics is the better sport but 90% of people are morons just look at what films sell most

krispy kremlin wrote:

How is it that one day everyone is talking about how detrimental a full collegiate xc/track career can be for guy's long term prospects and today people are demanding all the top teams race all their top guys...?

Also, the team comparison is difficult because, even in xc, it still comes down, acutely, to individual performance. The comparison should be to individual sports (tennis/golf/nascar).

I think you are arguing 2 different things. The full collegiate xc/track career may hurt someone's long term prospects but Rojo's argument was saying that the holding people out of races is not good for the popularity of the sport.

He is not suggesting that runners should run all of these races just that because it's not happening, sports fans have less of a reason of following cross and track except for the championship race alone (and likely regionals too).

This is up to the voters. If the rankings reflected poorly on poor performances or lack of competition that would solve it. If Alabama loses because they played their second string its still a loss. Rankings need to reflect this.

One quick fix is to have teams race. XC has to be the only sport that would rather workout than race. How do Universities allow this?

I think another reason why track is less popular is due to the way meets are conducted.

For many meets, it takes way to much time between events. As a spectator, this can be excruciatingly boring. A race that takes 2 minutes to complete but takes 10 minutes to set up does not bode well for spectators.

Solution? Work on efficiency. This has positives and negatives, for it could increase the interest of fans, but also makes the possibility of doubling events more difficult.

Branch Technology most likely charged upwards of 25K to time that meet with all the bells and whistles How many meets can afford the technology?

OSU is good enough that they do not have to do the 'regular season' thing; everybody else has some questions and works to qualify. Heard some carping about the Wisconsin race, but the first time I asked someone was able to answer immediately about the top several teams.

Also, Cross can be difficult with ten people finishing in a second and huge numbers finishing in a tight band and where in big races the team scores are dependent on runners as far back as 100th or more, even for top-10 teams.

When scores are close (e.g., Portland ahead of Wisconsin by one point, and most of the scorers for the two teams finished close enough that they probably needed to review the whole film of the finish, which is actually about film from four cameras.

I agree with you.

Aren't you also the genius who agreed with the genius that is Nick Symmonds that beer and betting would make track popular again in the USA?

(There is a long list of things to be done way-y before beer and betting to help the sport...most of which are never going to happen.)

Rojo should be on letsfootball.com.Running is an individual sport not a team sport. A pre season meet is not the Olympic final.If you're looking for a football game, you're probably not going to enjoy running.However I love running, and hate football. I haven't been to or watched a football game since being a kid, when I had to attend and didn't know any better. IMHO football sucks and there is nothing good about it at all, which is why football is not running. They have absolutely nothing in common.The running means something, to runners, not to weekend football jockeys, i.e. running is not football and football is not running. Duh! If you want football watch football.I like watching running events, because I like running, not because I like football. I don't like football! I like running. Running events are interesting to me whether they're on the track, roads, or cross country, races or workouts.

few care for the most part what happens in a 10k or half-marathon before a marathon

Well then go watch a football game so you won't have to whine and complain anymore!

you can go to a track or cross country meet, watch the whole thing, and leave without knowing who won the team battle.

Good. I don't care anyway.

A cross country meet finishes and it often takes 30 minutes to figure out who won.

Or you could just watch the race and see for yourself.

I said, "Our sport has inherent core attributes that make it less popular than team sports on a regular basis."

Team sports are only popular due to marketing, which is a false dichotomy because marketing and value are two different things. There is no value to getting drunk, banging your heads against walls, eating frogs and whatever other dumb things are done by football players and their fans. You can have it.

Personally I like running, and I like it fine as it is.