Texas HS Coach wrote:
Comparing FL finalists per capita is a poor way to determine what state has the best runners. You're measuring outliers per capita. Pointless. Mean running times in a large database are worth more. Or average time of runners at state meet in track events.
It will never be purely objective, but I think you have to look beyond the outliers.
Mean times don't show much difference between states, as was discussed on a thread here a few years ago.
I do agree, though, that extreme outliers aren't the best way to compare the states, especially when the criteria for the comparison is so limited in scope (FLN Qualifiers only? Not all the top athletes go to FLN, some of the top athletes don't even compete beyond their state meet, and that's a very small sample of the entire nation - and even looking at both NXN and FLN qualifiers combined doesn't give a deep enough look either).
Average time of runners at state meets won't work, because every state has different qualifying situations: some states a comparatively huge portion of athletes make it to state, other states have areas that are much more restricted than others, some states have multiple classes while others have a single classification.
You could take a look at, say, the average of the Top 100 times from every state, but then you run into a couple very significant problems: 1. Difference in population size (e.g. California is much bigger than Connecticut), and 2. Difference in conditions (Colorado is at significant altitude but Florida is at sealevel; it's hot in Texas, and it's cold in Alaska; the XC course in State X is much different than in State Y).