Jesse Squire | On 31, Oct 2016

Eastern Michigan dominated the Mid-American Conference Championships with a five-deep frontrunning pack.

Random thoughts, news, and views on the weekend’s collegiate cross country conference championship meets written in the Larry King style…

(For a recap of the weekend’s action, go to the USTFCCCA)

The Colorado Buffaloes were the weekend’s big winner as they swept the Pac-12 Championships. It’s hard to say that the men’s team scored an upset, despite the coaches’ poll ranking them as only third-best in the conference going into the meet. They were five-time defending champions and, as Paul Merca noted, if you want to be the man then you have to beat the man. The Pac-12 championship title belt stays in Boulder…

The Colorado women’s team was #1 in the poll going into the Pac-12 meet and so of course they were expected to win, but they faced #2 Washington, #5 Oregon, and #11 Stanford. Beating all of them is a tall order, but the Buffs did it easily. How easy was it? The total of their first seven runners beat everyone else’s top 5. Coach Mark Wetmore could have held out his top two runners and his team still would have beaten #2 Washington. They’re that good…

The weekend’s silver-medal winners were the fans of the Big Ten. Minnesota hosted this year and they have experience putting on big meets like the Roy Griak Invitational, but here they went even another extra mile. A pre-race fan fest (including free hot drinks) opened at 8:30 yesterday morning, but topping that was the live TV broadcast on the Big Ten Network. The time slot was perfectly chosen–the two hours leading into the NFL–and the production was decent for a bunch of first-timers. The announcing, camera work, and use of technology was less than ideal early in the telecast but all involved appeared to learn on the fly, and the production was noticably better at the end of the broadcast than at the beginning. Here’s to hoping the Big Ten Network continues this in the future…

Speaking of technology, Dipen Shah and his partners, Pat Leone & Rick Streeter (Leone Timing) and Sean Gavigan (Prime Time Timing) unveiled a new live-results web interface for some of the weekend’s meets, including the Ivy League championships. The formatting is their usual brilliant work that combines easy reading with complete information. Shah is one of the most important people in track and field that you’ve never heard of; he is a web developer who helped revolutionize the Penn Relays’ results site and created the site for this summer’s Olympic Trials…

That brings me to the Penn Quakers, who are this weekend’s bronze medal winners. The men won the Ivy League title for the first time since 1973 (back when it was known as the Heptagonal Games since it had seven teams and they weren’t all Ivy League institutions). The women’s team finished third behind two nationally-ranked teams…

After a long summer and fall of coaching high school cross country, my season was finally over and I went to Kent State University to see the Mid-American Conference championship meet. I have a pretty good relationship with the coaches at Bowling Green, and they invited me to ride along in their golf cart during the meet. It was nice, the equivalent of getting sideline passes for a football game. The Falcon runners made my trip worthwhile. The women had a good day, finishing third while sophomore Rachel Walny was a solid second overall. Her track PR is 16:58 but she finished in between a pair of Eastern Michigan runners whose PRs are 15:58, so that’s a solid day’s work. If she runs that well at the regional meet in two weeks, she just might have a shot at getting to the NCAA Championships…

The BG men had a remarkable day given their situation. The situation is not just that they are a cross-country only program (Bowling Green dropped men’s track fifteen years ago) but that they are a cross-country only program with a scholarship budget of zero. Recruiting good talent is not exactly easy. But men’s coach Chuck Wentz has worked some magic in his two years on campus. He overtook a team that was last in the conference for seven years in a row (often close to 100 points behind second-to-last) and took them up to seventh last year. On Saturday, despite losing their best runner to injury, the Falcon men were in a fight for third! — one they ultimately lost and took fifth. Still, they beat four funded programs and produced their best finish since winning the conference in 1995. Wentz took a bunch of guys more or less one step up from Rudy and made them competitive in a mid-major conference. Like other former BG coaches such as Jim Larranaga, Urban Meyer, and Bo Schembechler, I figure it won’t be long before Wentz is showing his abilities on a bigger stage…

I chatted with Eastern Michigan men’s coach John Goodridge after the meet. His team turned the meet into a bit of a laugher. The Eagles packed up five runners at the front and by the finish they were more than 100 yards clear of sixth for a perfect and uncontested 15 points. I said his team might finally get over the hump this year and qualify for the NCAA Championships, but he warned that his teams have been in the same situation before. Last year EMU took third at the Great Lakes regional and but the region produced no at-large qualifiers for the first time in about forever. The MAC was once a dominant national power in men’s cross country (in 1965 the MAC took 1st, 3rd, 7th and 13th at the NCAA Championships) but hasn’t produced a men’s team qualifier to the nationals since 2005…

Goodridge said he thought that there were four men’s teams in the Great Lakes region who were essentially equal: his Eastern Michigan team along with Michigan, Wisconsin, and Indiana. He thought that on any given day any of them could be first or last among the group. The next morning he was more or less proven right, as Wisconsin won the Big Ten championships in an upset and Michigan finished a surprising fifth. Unranked Michigan State very nearly won the meet, which might expand the pool of unpredictables to five teams…

The MAC meet also probably had the fastest spectator in the country. Olympic bronze medalist Clayton Murphy was fourth for Akron in each of the last two MAC cross country championships but gave up his remaining eligibility after his stunning Olympic run…

Oregon’s Edward Cheserek rightly got a lot of attention for being the first ever 4-time men’s Pac-8/10/12 cross country champion. I think it’s worth looking at three others who could have been but weren’t. In 1977, Henry Rono’s sophomore year, he engaged in team running with Joel Cheruiyot and came second despite twisting an ankle the day before. In 1969, Steve Prefontaine’s freshman year, he ran basically a dead heat against Gerry Lindgren, one of the greatest collegiate runners of all time. Lindgren himself would doubtlessly have won the previous three Pac-8 cross country championships, but the conference didn’t sponsor cross country until his senior year…

Surging: the state of Mississippi. The Magnolia State and cross country do not typically go together, but they are this year. The Ole Miss Rebels gave Arkansas a real fight in the men’s race at the SEC Championships and took second in the women’s race as well, and it appears likely that both will qualify to the NCAA Championships out of the South region. The Mississippi State women were fourth in the SEC meet and have a very good shot at the NCAAs as well…

Slowing: Oregon Ducks. If the polls were any indication–and they did have very good predictive power across the country this weekend–then the Oregon cross country teams underperformed at the Pac-12 Championships. The Duck men were co-favorites but finished fourth (and lost to UCLA for the first time since Ronald Reagan was seeking re-election) and the Oregon women lost to Stanford, a team ranked six spots lower than the Ducks…

You’d think that a team that couldn’t win its conference would be a significant underdog in terms of winning the NCAA Championships, but there’s plenty of precedent otherwise. When the MAC dominated the NCAAs in 1965 and had the team and individual champions in Western Michigan and Elmore Banton, neither of them won the conference championship that year. Ohio University beat Western Michigan at the MAC meet by a fairly large margin, and Banton got passed in the last mile…