Portland ruins sport, gets 2nd at NCAAs

The Angel of Death wrote:

Waiting for a Gualt hot take any minute now!!!!!

Thank you for this thread.

Matt Welch, Minnesota graduate transfer, ran his first race for the Pilots to finishing 4th for Portland. While Gault May hate this idea, I love it. Do what you gotta do the put our your best effort at NCAAs. In XC, nothing else matters. Look at how many individuals and teams underperformed today (and every year). This doesn’t happen because they’re unfit—-it’s because the kids are tired, injured, or overcooked.

Goucher Needles wrote:

Matt Welch, Minnesota graduate transfer, ran his first race for the Pilots to finishing 4th for Portland. While Gault May hate this idea, I love it. Do what you gotta do the put our your best effort at NCAAs. In XC, nothing else matters. Look at how many individuals and teams underperformed today (and every year). This doesn’t happen because they’re unfit—-it’s because the kids are tired, injured, or overcooked.

+1

Congrats to the Pilots and to coach Connor.

Winning at the conference level should not be the primary goal for any XC team.

You do what you need to do to win at the highest level you can be competitive.

Portland would finish 2nd at conference with or without top guys so I see no issue.

I’m guessing you never ran D1. Kids aren’t cooked from the 3 races a year, it’s the daily grind of racing practice.

Probably a good call to be careful with Welch. For Minnesota last year he went from getting 2nd at Griak early in the year to trying to survive the season.

The amount of butt-hurt in this recap is unreal:

http://www.letsrun.com/news/2017/11/favorites-justyn-knight-northern-arizona-deliver-win-2017-ncaa-cross-country-titles/

Three mentions of how BYU beat Portland at the WCC meet before even getting into how Portland - a complete underdog, tiny private school that has now finished on the podium twice in the past three years - just achieved their best finish in school history.

And the video interview with Conner is a complete joke. His team just took 2nd at nationals, and the first thing they ask him about is the WCC meet. RC explains his strategy perfectly and then moves on to discuss Nationals. But they can't seem to drop it, and ask him about the WCC meet again at the end, forcing Rob to repeat himself.

JFC, get over it.

If you don't want to run at the conference meet, leave the conference. Become an independent. Otherwise, show up and race. Don't say it can't be done. NAU has done it for two straight years now and this year they broke the will of almost the entire field while coming off three straight races. Perhaps this is more about the Portland coach making it all about him than the athletes not being up to the task.

As am I.

The Angel of Death wrote:

Waiting for a Gault hot take any minute now!!!!!

I'm a Big East alumn. It's not that we didn't care about the Big East Championship - I think we did care a bit - but every year we most def trained hard right through that race. I think everyone ran it (from our school and other programs) without ever going deep into the well. Indeed, the race seemed tactical each year probably because everyone else was training hard thru it, and it seems, looking back, that no one had the stomach (desire or energy) to push that race hard when bigger events were just around the corner. I can tell you - I can barely remember who won our conf champs as those memories have grown quite bleary. I believe conference champs might be is important for some (Heps comes to mind) - but certainly not for everyone.

Back in the day I ran for a perennial top-10 NJ HS XC program. We seemed to race every weekend, and conference champs was just another race. Indeed it felt far less important than some early season invites that we would travel to run. So, I couldn't even tell you how I finished at our conference championships, but I remember every damn detail of our races at Holmdel! My guess is that this analogy holds for many top NCAA XC programs.

ItsNotMeItsYou wrote:

If you don't want to run at the conference meet, leave the conference. Become an independent. Otherwise, show up and race.

Misinformed comments like this are hilarious. The Pilots DID race the conference meet. They took 2nd behind a stacked BYU team, in a 9-team field. Beating 7 other conference teams, including #29-ranked San Francisco. They "showed up and raced" with 2 top guys and 5 other very good up-and-coming Pilots that RC wanted to provide with some racing experience. Just like he's always done.

RC is smart. He realized that he might have one chance to beat BYU this season. Maybe. Should he do that at WCC's, in what would essentially be a dual meet? Or in the relative chaos and unpredictability of a full 10k at NCAA's, with a big field and plenty of displacers and potential for packs to be broken up and separated?

One shot. UP took it at Nationals, and they didn't miss.

ItsNotMeItsYou wrote:

If you don't want to run at the conference meet, leave the conference. Become an independent. Otherwise, show up and race. Don't say it can't be done. NAU has done it for two straight years now and this year they broke the will of almost the entire field while coming off three straight races. Perhaps this is more about the Portland coach making it all about him than the athletes not being up to the task.

So the Portland coach not running his guys into the ground so they have the best shot at running well when it matters the most is "making it all about him?" Really? Very nice logic there.

Every team is different. Kudos to the Portland coach for managing his team well and kudos for the same reason to the NAU coach. Different strokes...

Enjoy the moral victory of 2nd place.

I tend to give a little more creedence to the approach of NAU, which will enjoy the Conference title, Region title and National title because they "show up and race," and race to win, not place.

ItsNotMeItsYou wrote:

If you don't want to run at the conference meet, leave the conference. Become an independent. Otherwise, show up and race. Don't say it can't be done. NAU has done it for two straight years now and this year they broke the will of almost the entire field while coming off three straight races. Perhaps this is more about the Portland coach making it all about him than the athletes not being up to the task.

Every runner was on board with Conner’s decision to rest guys for conference. Do you really think they care now about not winning WCCs? How is that making it about himself? If anything, he is not making it about himself by not winning a conference meet

Portland won the West Regional, FYI.

Also, two of NAU's top five runners (Lomong and Beamish) today didn't run at the Big Sky championships.

NAU was still able to win the Big Sky championship because they didn't have to run against BYU like Portland did. The team Portland raced at the WCC's would have beaten Southern Utah, the #2 team in the Big Sky.

ItsNotMeItsYou wrote:

Enjoy the moral victory of 2nd place.

I tend to give a little more creedence to the approach of NAU, which will enjoy the Conference title, Region title and National title because they "show up and race," and race to win, not place.

You sound like a bitter and petty little man, we'd feel sorry for you but it's too much fun to scoff!

No one on the Bluff is gonna give a rip about WCC's when 2nd at nationals hardware is on the plane back home. Conner has been vindicated. There's gonna be Cristal at communion for a week.

Jon Gault, rojo, Ed Eyestone and BYU, time to kiss the ring and kneel.

There are teams and athletes that can crush the conference, regional, and National races—-and teams that can’t. NCAAs need to be prioritized to do well there. There are teams that are happy just to get there. That’s fine, but they typically underperform at The Big Dance.

I can’t imagine BYU wouldn’t trade their conference win for a higher placing at NCAAs.

For the 50th consecutive NCAA XC Championship Meet, 80% of the athletes ran poorly; 20% ran their best races of the season. That just shouldn’t happen.

Why So Salty, RoJo? wrote:

The amount of butt-hurt in this recap is unreal:

http://www.letsrun.com/news/2017/11/favorites-justyn-knight-northern-arizona-deliver-win-2017-ncaa-cross-country-titles/

Three mentions of how BYU beat Portland at the WCC meet before even getting into how Portland - a complete underdog, tiny private school that has now finished on the podium twice in the past three years - just achieved their best finish in school history.

And the video interview with Conner is a complete joke. His team just took 2nd at nationals, and the first thing they ask him about is the WCC meet. RC explains his strategy perfectly and then moves on to discuss Nationals. But they can't seem to drop it, and ask him about the WCC meet again at the end, forcing Rob to repeat himself.

JFC, get over it.

Ha. Coach Conner was great. I didn't detect any animosity between him and Jon. People can civilly disagree on things. Maybe we need to give some context. Jon and I went up and congratulated him and told him he'd get the last laugh for sure. Then he started talking about the conference meet and kept talking about it. It was in the context of how they had to do what was best to finish well today. But finally I think I was the one who said, "hey let's talk about the today".

Great run by Pilots. Also, he said his guys were embarrassed at conference meet, the ones who ran, as they were going all out and still got perfect scored. Pretty interesting. He also knew all of Jon Gault's PRs etc. Pretty funny. Thanked us for being the watchdogs of the sport on the anti-doping side of things.

Conner's point was a) they weren't going to win conference b) the guys who ran, ran all out and that was enough to get 2nd and c) he had an ace up his sleeve who was going to run at Nationals today but had been hurt all year.

I don't think many people would criticize a team that rested a guy or two at conference and still won the meet. So if you're convinced you're going to get 2nd and you rest someone and still get 2nd what's the difference might be the argument?

If you then deliver and get 2nd at NCAAs big thumbs up.