NCAA XC men’s team preview: OK State looks for 2nd title in 3 years as Iowa State chases title amid controversy

In the last 20 years of the NCAA cross country championships, no team ranked outside of the top three heading into the meet has won the men’s team title. That statistic is very likely to hold in 2025 as the top three teams in the coaches’ poll — #1 Oklahoma State, #2 Iowa State, and #3 New Mexico — have all been significantly better than everyone else this fall. There are certainly scenarios where one of them has an off day and finishes off the podium, but one of those three teams will almost certainly be your champion at this weekend’s NCAA meet in Columbia, Mo.

Oklahoma State and Iowa State have been podium regulars in recent years as OK State was 2nd in 2022 and 1st in 2023 while Iowa State was 2nd in 2021 and 2024 (though the Cyclones haven’t won it all since 1994). The New Mexico men have never finished higher than 9th at NCAAs, but the program has quickly developed into a contender since coach Darren Gauson took the reins in 2023.

All three teams are constructed similarly and rely heavily on African runners, specifically Kenyans. Five of OK State’s top six from the conference meet were born in Africa, three of them in Kenya; meanwhile both Iowa State and New Mexico have four Kenyans in their top five, with South Africa’s Sanele Masondo (Iowa State) and Eritrea’s Habtom Samuel (New Mexico) rounding out their groups. It’s part of a larger trend in recent years where many schools have paid thousands of dollars to recruiting services to bring top Kenyan talent to the NCAA. (Check out this LRC feature from 2024: Here’s Why There Are So Many Top Kenyan Runners in the NCAA This Year — Scholarbook & the New NCAA Math).

I break down each team’s chances below.

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#1 Oklahoma State

Oklahoma State has the single most impressive performance of any team during the 2025 season. At the Big 12 meet on October 31, which featured the teams currently ranked #1 (OK State), #2 (Iowa State), #7 (Colorado), and #8 (BYU) in the country, the Cowboys went 1-2-4-6-7 to win with just 20 points. Had the meet been scored as a dual meet, the rest of the conference against OK State, the Cowboys would still have won handily.

On paper, that result was an upset — at the time, Iowa State was ranked #1 and OK State #2 — but the Cowboys’ talent was never in doubt. Two years ago, OK State scored 49 points to win NCAAs in a rout, and their top three runners from 2023 — Denis Kipngetich, Brian Musau, and Fouad Messaoudi — are all still on the roster.

So why aren’t the Cowboys overwhelming favorites in 2025? Well, Kipngetich, Musau, and Messaoudi were all on the team last year as well (plus 2023 12th placer Victor Shitsama, who has since graduated) and OK State imploded at nationals last year, finishing 8th.

Looking back, Oklahoma State coach Dave Smith believes two things contributed to last year’s failure. One is that the dominant win in 2023 may have led them to underestimate just how difficult it would be to repeat. The other is that last year’s team probably trained too hard and entered the NCAA meet worn down as a result.

“When you have a big breakthrough, the psychology is naturally you tend towards thinking, oh, I can start training at a different level — now I train harder, now I can do more, now I can go faster,” Smith said. “…When the workouts got rolling and things got out of hand, I didn’t pull back on the reins enough.”

Smith has pulled on the reins more in 2025, and so far, it is working. The best proof is Adisu Guadie, who finished a surprising 2nd at Big 12s behind Musau. A few times this year, Guadie (50th at ’23 NCAA XC) has asked to be moved to a slower group in workouts, even though he has the talent to hang with OK State’s top guys. Smith has granted those requests; he has found that Guadie races better when he is a little undertrained.

Healthwise, OK State’s top group is also in a good spot. The only concern on that front is actually Smith, who suffered a collapsed lung on November 8 and spent much of last week in the hospital. Because of the lung, Smith is unable to fly for several months; fortunately Columbia is a manageable six-hour drive from Stillwater.

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 Path to victory: OK State has three guys who have multiple top-12 finishes at NCAA XC in Musau (8th in ’23, 5th in ’24), Kipngetich (4th in ’23, 11th in ’24), and Messaoudi (12th in ’22, 10th in ’23). Both Messaoudi and Musau are individual NCAA xc champions on the track as well (Messaoudi won the 3k in 2023, Musau won the indoor and outdoor 5000s in 2025). If those guys can all finish in the top 15 on Saturday, that’s a great start.

OSU’s other two scorers are likely to be Guadie and Ryan Schoppe (53rd at ’22 NCAA XC). They already showed how good they could be at Big 12s this year — Guadie was 2nd and Schoppe was 7th (five seconds ahead of Iowa State’s #3). If they can replicate performance or even come close, they will make the Cowboys very hard to beat.

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Laban Kipkemboi is more of a miler but is a solid insurance plan at #6 — he was 14th at Big 12s, one spot behind Iowa State’s #5.

How they can be beaten: Musau and Kipngetich are super reliable and close to locks for the top 15. But one needs only look at last year to see how things can go wrong: Messaoudi fell and finished 222nd; Schoppe and Guadie both got buried early and never recovered; Kipkemboi had the opposite problem, going out too hard and blowing up. Schoppe, who anchored Oklahoma State to the NCAA DMR title with a 3:52 splt in 2023, has never finished in the top 50 at NCAAs (121st in 2024, 53rd in 2022, 225th in 2021). It’s unlikely that all of those guys run as poorly as they did in 2024. But if the pace is hot early, Iowa State and UNM may be able to open up a gap that OK State is unable to close.

#2 Iowa State

For better or worse — perhaps both — the 2025 cross country season will be a memorable one for Iowa State. On the course, the Cyclones may have their best squad since the 1994 group that won NCAAs. Off the course, multiple athletes were suspended the week before the Big 12 meet for violating team rules (Editor’s note: that many believe are PED related), while their top runner at Big 12s, Robin Bera, was arrested in October after leaving the scene of a traffic accident.

“It’s been difficult,” head coach Jeremy Sudbury told LetsRun.com.

MB: Update: Multiple Iowa State athletes suspended for season for “breaking team rules,” Head coach Jeremy Sudbury confirms none from top 7 

Let’s start with the positive: Iowa State has a team capable of winning it all. Heck, the Cyclones may have won it all last year if not for a fall from Joash Ruto. Running in just his second collegiate race, Ruto was one of several athletes to fall on a muddy Madison course, going from 13th at 4k to 83rd at 5k. He wound up making it back to 34th, but if he had run 8.7 seconds faster and finished 20th, that would have been enough for the Cyclones to win.

Iowa State lost two of its top five from that race, but it brought back a formidable group for 2025, which led to the Cyclones earning the preseason #1 ranking in the coaches’ poll. Here are the credentials of that group:

When those five guys all raced at the Gans Creek Classic in September — on the same Missouri course that will host NCAAs — Iowa State crushed the competition, scoring 47 points to win by 60 points against a field that featured nine of the top 12 teams in the most recent coaches’ poll.

Those guys did not race again for a month — an intentional decision by Sudbury, who wanted them to get as strong as possible. Iowa State has historically focused more than most programs on peaking hard for the 10k distance at NCAAs, but Sudbury has leaned into it even more in 2025, even moving to three workouts per week at times — Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday as opposed to their traditional Tuesday/Friday.

“I saw enough at Gans Creek that we were in a pretty good spot physically that I thought we could do better in training than racing again,” Sudbury said.

When Iowa State did race its top guys again, at Big 12s, they were trampled by Oklahoma State, 20-43. But Iowa State has a history of running much better at NCAAs than Big 12s. In 2023, they were 4th at Big 12s and 5th at NCAAs. Last year, they were 3rd at Big 12s and 2nd at NCAAs.

And, all things considered, Iowa State didn’t run awful at Big 12s this year. The race was very close at 5k (OK State led, 43-46), but OK State crushed the final 3k. Sudbury said that, in retrospect, he made a mistake by not having his guys push the pace more early on.

“I’ve always felt that this team specifically is kind of a grinding, longer, 10k-type team and maybe we lack a little bit of that closing-it-down speed more like a miler,” Sudbury said. “The results, in my opinion, just showed that it was a 3k race…In hindsight, I should have had our guys send it, basically.”

Multiple suspensions and an arrest

Few NCAA cross country teams have had as turbulent a stretch as the one Iowa State endured in the leadup to the Big 12 meet on October 31. First, on October 22, Bera was arrested on a warrant for leaving the scene of a traffic accident in September. Three days later, Sudbury announced that multiple members of the Iowa State team had been suspended for the rest of the season due to violations of team rules.

Sudbury said he was aware of Bera’s arrest but he was cleared by the athletic department to compete for the rest of the season. In an interview on Monday, Sudbury, following athletic department guidance, told LetsRun.com he could not offer any more details on the suspended athletes, but said none of Iowa State’s top five were among those suspended.

When the news broke about the suspended athletes (The Stride Report first reported it), rumors swirled about the cause and Sudbury said that served as a distraction for the team ahead of the Big 12 meet. But he believes his squad has moved past it at this point.

“We, as a team, as a whole, have learned a lot through this experience and it allows you to get closer to the people that are in your camp,” Sudbury said.

That togetherness will be necessary, because Sudbury expects fans to be rooting against his squad at NCAAs this weekend.

“It’s something that I’ve learned a lot from, so I can only imagine that our athletes having the same kind of experience and what it means to try to still run at a super high level while maybe people are rooting against you pretty hard,” Sudbury said. “…I think, unfortunately because I haven’t been able to share more than I’ve been allowed to share about team rules being broken and having to suspend athletes, I think just that right there itself opens everybody up to a lot of speculation. And whether it’s self-created or not, I definitely think there’s a feeling that we’ve taken on a persona of maybe not being very well-liked.”

Path to victory: Sudbury believes he has five men on his team now who are capable of breaking 27:50 for 10,000 meters on the track. If they can push the pace early and turn this into a true 10k race and make their usual leap in performance from Big 12s to NCAAs, Iowa State may be able to turn the tables on Oklahoma State.

MB: Ok State watch out. Jeremy Sudbury says Iowa State has 5 guys that could go sub-27:50 right now

How they can be beaten: We already saw OK State close much stronger than Iowa State at the conference meet. And the Cyclones don’t have much margin for error as Iowa State’s #6 man at conference, Devan Kipyego, was 32 seconds back of their #5. A lot is riding on the backs of Iowa State’s five stars — particularly freshman Meshack Kimutai, who has only run two collegiate races (19th at Gans Creek and 13th at Big 12s) since coming over from Kenya in the summer.

“Unless Devan has a race that really over-runs his fitness, it’s going to come down to whether our top five guys get it done or not,” Sudbury said. “We can’t afford 50 or 60 points at the fifth man. I think your fifth man’s gotta be inside the top 30 to have a chance to win.”

#3 New Mexico

When Darren Gauson succeeded Joe Franklin as New Mexico coach in 2023, he inherited a men’s team that had not been to NCAAs since 2014. That drought ended right away after Gauson brought in Habtom Samuel and Evans Kiplagat, both of whom were All-Americans as freshmen. The Lobos finished 18th that year. In 2024, New Mexico added in two more reinforcements from Africa in Collins Kiprotich and Vincent Chirchir and improved to 9th. Now, with 8:22 steepler Mathew Kosgei in the fold, New Mexico rolls five deep and has the talent to make a title charge.

New Mexico’s best performance this year came at the Nuttycombe Invitational, where they won with just 51 points. Nuttycombe is the biggest, deepest field of the year outside of NCAAs, and 51 points is a great total – in the last 15 years, only three teams have scored fewer, and all three went on to win NCAAs. The caveat here is that neither Oklahoma State nor Iowa State ran Nuttycombe (well, Iowa State did, but it was their B team). New Mexico did race OK State close on their home course at the Cowboy Jamboree (OK State won 36-41), but that was back in September and neither team was at full strength.

Samuel has finished 2nd in each of the past two years and should finish in the top 3 again on Saturday. It’s how UNM’s 2-3-4-5 guys run that will determine their title chances. Here is their top six:

Path to victory: Compared to Iowa State, UNM has a better #1 in Samuel and a better #6 in case something goes wrong. To win, they’ll need one of their guys besides Samuel to step up and finish in the top 15 and the other three scorers to finish somewhere between 20th and 50th.

How they can be beaten: Both OK State and Iowa State have more experienced teams — only three guys on UNM’s team have ever finished in the top 100 at NCAAs before. They passed their first test at Nuttycombe, but how will they respond in the madness of NCAAs?

***

JG prediction: 1. Oklahoma State 2. Iowa State 3. New Mexico

BYU won with 124 points last year. I expect that two, perhaps three teams will score fewer than that on Saturday. Part of me is tempted to pick Iowa State in an upset — I expect them to be much better than they were at Big 12s, and the 10k distance favors them. But if OK State runs like they did at Big 12s, it’s hard to see them losing. I’ll go with the Cowboys FTW.

Talk about the 2025 NCAA Cross Country Championships on our world-famous fan forum / messageboard.

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Come back to LetsRun.com for more coverage including individual previews, women’s previews and a free prediction contest that will be up soon. We’ll also be doing live video shoes from Columbia. Join the Supporters Club to catch them on demand as a podcast.