Cross country, time vs. place: An analysis

I'm a numbers guy. Anyone who reads this blog gets that. It’s why I love baseball; baseball is a quantifiable game. It’s a numbers game. And I love the advanced metrics of baseball too, because it goes a long way toward explaining the seemingly unexplainable. But worry not: This will not devolve into another long-winded treatise on baseball numbers.

So yeah. I’m a numbers guy. Of course! What do I post after every track meet? Splits, splits and more splits. Sometimes even splits of splits. In numbers, there are truths. Right. Right?

Well. Trying to apply this to cross country sometimes proves to be a slippery slope. Lord knows, I have tried. Anyone who has ever seen my all-time Van Cortlandt Park time lists for men gets it. The course at Vanny remained unchanged for decade after decade after decade; we were able to compare and contrast generations of runners – from Marty McGowan (1970s) to Marty Feeney (1990s); from Greg Salamone (late-90s/early 00s) to Nick Salamone (current freshman). However, in the past five or so years, due to construction at the park, the Vanny course has undergone many different variations. This, of course, skewed the record-keeping; which, of course, annoyed me – and others who care about such stuff -- to no end. But alas, it is what it is.

Through the years, I have come to realize that cross country is a sport that is about place. Whenever we try to judge cross country teams and cross country athletes strictly by time performance, we often miss the mark. It’s about beating the guy next to you. Oh sure, we set time goals, especially on courses that we have run year after year after year. But ultimately, we must judge as much on place as on time; track is not always like that, but cross country is usually like that.

This brings us to the men’s results of today’s Iona meet at Vanny. Alumni and close followers of the program may be taken aback at the relatively slow times posted by the men. My quick analysis of the meet to the team was this: We are definitely not pleased with how we ran, but we are also not discouraged. The effort was there, top to bottom. Do we need to get better? Of course we need to get better!

But OK, here’s what you are waiting for (or not): How about some numbers analysis, huh? Top to bottom, all coaches agreed that the times were much slower than normal today, for whatever reason. We will not try to delve into the “why” of this. Rather, how about a little perspective, shall we?

OK. Here goes. Today’s winning team, by a lot, was Iona College. No shocker there. It’s their home meet, they are nationally ranked as usual and they appear to be the top team in the Northeast Region again. So, how fast did the Gaels run today? Their top-5 man average time was 25:45.

Now, a little Marist program history: The top four team top-5 averages in Marist history goes like this:

1. MAAC 2011, 25:40.6 (Griffin, Flint, DelaCruz, Lipari, Walshak)
2. IC4A 2010, 25:42.0 (Flint, DelaCruz, Griffin, Walshak, Keegan)
3. IC4A 2008, 25:44.6 (Raucci, Segni, Keegan, Griffin, Shelley)
4. Iona 2008, 25:45.6 (Segni, Raucci, Shelley, Flint, Keegan)

This means that Iona’s team today was exactly equivalent to the fourth-best team in Marist history – and the exact same team, timewise, as the one that ran at this very meet, almost to the day, five years ago. Think about that for a moment. That team, which by the way finished an excellent sixth place at that meet, was not national caliber; not even close. It wasn’t even the best Vanny team in school history. And yet, it was equivalent today to a national powerhouse team. Do you think my friends down at Iona are crunching the numbers and wringing their hands like this over these times today? Uh, no. Their athletes won the race. They raced hard, and they raced in a strong pack, and they dominated a pretty strong field out there. The times are what they are. This bothers the logical, numbers guy in me, but it is also instructive in terms of the importance of placement over time.