Not 4/4 wrote:
Oh? wrote:
Meanwhile, I don't think he was as high as he should have been on several of those teams (both of the NY teams, ironically, as well as Mountain View and in particular Mead).
Hahaha now you're just being silly.
Meylan projected FM to finish 3rd (right where they finished), and gave Saratoga a solid shot at winning, with a good race (they won). How could he have been any higher on those NY teams? Tell them to skip NTN and run NCAA's instead? Sheesh.
I didn't say he had them drastically underrated, just that he didn't have them as high as he maybe should have. He had Saratoga 70 points behind York, and Saratoga won by 23. I don't think there was much difference between the top teams (FM and Saratoga from NY, York IL, Joel Ferris and Mead from WA, Mountain View UT, Royal CA, CBA NJ and maybe Fort Collins CO). Most of those teams he projected as finishing with anywhere from 139 points (York) to 233 points (Fort Collins), and that is mostly fine. At a meet like NTN, points can add up quickly, and the difference between those team scores isn't what it really appears on paper (even though that's what we're arguing about right now). He had Mountain View at 311 (most definitely underrated). I'm ok with his projections because of the statements he made before the race: his pre-race comments section (note that he mentioned 7 teams that he thought could challenge for the win, only leaving out the two SW teams IMO), plus the qualifier at the top of that page - essentially that it was too early in the NTN history to really understand that well how teams from different regions compare to eachother before the race, and he didn't have all that great familiarity with all of the teams and all of their performances and all of the courses they were running on, and as a result the projections give an idea about what group of runners each individual probably belongs in, the precision of the team projections isn't going to be that great due to too much uncertainty involved in the process.
I think that's where people are overreacting to results: they read too much into the rough projections, and don't give enough credit to the nuance that makes a few seconds here and there total dozens of points and shift things completely. I think that, unfortunately, the wording of his post-race comments emphasizes that: that may not have been a great race by Royal, but it really wasn't much worse than the other teams that were very similar to them aside from those top 3-4 finishers (and the Mountain View team that Meylan was overlooking). If Royal had, say, the seventh best race out of the field of 20, I would say that compared to the rest of the field they had a pretty solid day. For what it's worth, I don't think that's very nearly out of the question especially considering the acknowledgements he made before the race (not a high degree of precision to his projections due to uncertainty and the large grouping of runners).
If you look at Royal's prerace ratings he lists on that page, you'll see plenty of ties and plenty of runners near them. If they run 10 seconds slower than those projections (a reasonable amount of uncertainty + a slightly off day, or maybe better days by other runners, would extremely easily explain that -- especially considering the muddy conditions), they go from scoring about 140 points to scoring about 225 points. They scored right about halfway between that, due to a small handful of teams running notably better than he projected (certainly Saratoga, Mountain View and Jesuit, and I'd argue York and FM and maybe Mead as well).
I'm sure we'd be having this same conversation even if his prerace projections were instead something along the lines of 140 for York, 145 for FM, 170 for Royal, 175 for Saratoga, 180 for Joel Ferris, 190 for Mead, 195 for Mountain View and CBA, and 210 for Fort Collins... even though those scores suggest that it wouldn't take much at all for one team to move up/down several spots. And especially considering that it was the early years of NTN and we didn't understand as well how runners from different parts of the nation compared, and the muddy conditions those runners faced in Portland Meadows.
In fact, if you really want to look into it and compare his prerace projections and the performances at the meet... there were 136 runners that he had ratings for that ran at NTN. Comparing their time to their prerace rating would suggest a 16:41.91 would equal a 200.0 performance if you use multipliers, or 16:39.4 if you strictly use Meylan's +/- system of adjustment. Using those adjustments, Royal's prerace ratings suggest they should have run between a 17:25.3 (multiplier) and a a 17:28.3 (Meylan's +/- system). Royal's actual team average at the race was a 17:25.6, which is almost exactly the FIELD AVERAGE. In other words, Royal ran somewhere between perfectly average and BETTER than the average of the entire NTN field. Hard to say "at worst average" is the same thing as "ran like poop".