Can we get something straight here? This thread is not about picking favorites that are locks to win barring a meteor strike that hasn't been seen since the Jurassic Park animals went night-night. Meaning, you're not aloud to pick the FM girls or Tuohy. OK? If those are your picks you might as well throw in your prediction that you think you're going to wake up tomorrow morning.
Now listen. I mean really listen. Shut that voice up in your head. Because St. Francis of Mountain View is the team with the greatest likelihood of upset. I for one want to see it for no other reason than to see a repeat performance of Chase Equall's reaction to winning last year. Someone winning that thought they could, but also thought it was just a dream until it actually happened. It's the perfect setup. Well, almost perfect. It would have helped if they'd been to this race a few times. One could easily argue that St. Francis put on a better show than Great Oak when factoring in the temperature differential of 63F for GO v. 72F for STF.
That 9 degrees is worth something. Jack Daniels says it's worth 13 seconds over 5K. If that's true, STF beats GO by approximately 10 points in their state merge. They have a little bit of deer-in-the-headlights going on right now, but if you see the stigmata on their hands or wrists around mile 2 it's game over, gentleman. May they do Francesco proud.
I think I'm gonna double down while I'm talking like Lavar. St Francis takes it. Great Oak is on the podium, either 2nd or 3rd, and Roosevelt is fifth. I think Lalo may cry if this happens. I would.
As stated previously, one does not pick Goliath in such a thread. The trick is who can pick David from the crowd? Ironically, actually I don't even know what ironic means anymore because of that damned song by Alanis Morissette song. In case I'm right on the meaning I'll just go with it: Ironically, David is in Goliath's body and vice-versa. My pick is Haley Herberg. You know her, right? The Katie Rainsberger looking girl? Yeah, who'd of guessed someone that looks like Rainsberger could also run fast. Weird. Herberg ran 16:59.9 at Woodward Park last weekend. Of the 9 or 10 girls that have broken 17:00 at Woodard Park, something like half of them went on to be national champions. On top of that, the times at the state meet were measurably slower this year than past years.
Her time is what it is, 17:00 if you like to round up because you don't trust automatic timing can record precisely to the 1/100th of a second, but the point is her performance last weekend was about 15 seconds slower than what Brie Oakley ran here last year to win. Certainly not enough to beat the favorite, but that's my pick of who is waiting in the shadows for Tuohy to appear human.
Herberg may have some extra motivation after being slighted by NXN when they brought all the fastest individual runners up from each region to have a one-on-one question and answer session with Shalane Flanagan for the girls and Evan Jager for the boys. Except they didn't invite the fastest individual runners from California onto the stage. They made her and Justin Hazel stay in the crowd. Considering they selected the individuals strictly by time with nothing like temperature factoring in (what would Kristin Fahy and Gillian Wagner have run in the D1 race that was 59F instead of 73F for D3?) one would wonder what Nike was thinking leaving the top California representatives out. Would they have left Claudia Lane out too?
Boys individual pick: James Mwaura all the way, are you guys even serious? Dude didn't even have his mouth open when he was finishing up his regional win.