NCAA: Male Athletes, Dumb. Cross Country Runners, Nerds

The NCAA handed out penalties yesterday for over 200 sports teams across the nation. The penalties were in response to the poor "Academic Progree Rates" (APR) of the teams and included the snatching away of precious scholarships and other "sanctions," whatever that means.

The most notable, if not suprising in the least, part of the report was how many men's teams were fingered with low APR's versus the low number of women's teams.

Of course, most of us former "athletes" have experienced the bus ride home from competitions where the men's team, and the one or two "cool" members of the women's team, are playing "would you rather..." and explaining to innocent teammates what a "donkey punch" is, while the rest of the women's team studies their accounting textbooks. So, this isn't a suprise, just interesting to see it listed on paper.


The other noteable, if once again not suprising, bit of information from the report is that cross country teams are by and large overrun by nerds who get good grades. Cross Country teams, while having the second highest number of total teams in the NCAA (300 to basketball's 337), has only 5 penalized teams (compared to basketball's 53 and football's [I can't find the infinity symbol on my keyboard]).

Just for fun, you can find your favorite college team's stats here.

Kent State men's XC team(my former team) scored a 988 APR and is proudly sitting between the 80th and 90th percentile among all NCAA teams and Fordham's XC team(Jeremy's alma mater) scored a 994 and is between the 90th and 100th percentile.

Therefore, Jeremy is a certified L7 dweebey while I'm an intelligent, but not intimidatingly so, poet-philosopher who can enjoy both a raucous night out on the town as well as a quiet romantic evening with a special lady friend. I always assumed such personalities for Jeremy and I, but it's just nice to see it all out on official documents, ya know?

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The Fix Is In: NCAA Track

No, not a betting or a points-shaving scandal. We're literally going to fix NCAA Track and Field with this here little chunk of writing and a whole heap of naivete. From the Track and Field Superfan: college track should move to a "true" team championships, utilizing dual meets to heighten competition, first increasing drama, then interest, then buzz, then attention, then coverage, then exposure, then you're riding in the back of a cop car even though you've explained at least twelve times that she wanted to see it. She just didn't know it yet. jsquire points out:

Qualifying [to Nationals] is based on marks and marks alone. So unless you've got a chance to run a fast time, there's no reason to run. Even worse, running fast is more important than winning. Collegiate milers would rather run 3:58 and lose than run 4:01 and win--and any sport set up this way is going to be boring, boring, boring.

Too true. I can already hear the outcry from athletes and coaches at the prospect of doing a true "March Madness"-style championship. Too much racing! Too much traveling! Too much leveling of the playfield!

But imagine how exciting it would be - not only do you get head-to-head, easy-to-follow competitions, but the intrigue of coaches trying to use just enough of their resources to win an early round but keep their guys fresh enough to win next week. It would be quite the high-wire act and produce plenty of subplots and storylines.

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Iona: Meet of the Champion?

I'll say it: Iona certainly looked like the #3 team in the country on Saturday. Cornell held its varsity out, but the Gaels still beat a bunch of the better teams on the East Coast, while sitting several of their studs. Plug in Father Abraham and Harbert the Love Bug and the Gaels probably go 1-5-6-7-8 against a handful of teams just beyond the borders of at-large-land. Oh and what's that? Ledwith didn't race either? Yeah. Iona looks dominant.

But I'd say it ends there. They only LOOK like the #3 team in the country. The biggest knock on these guys (knocks by all you xenophobes notwithstanding) has been that nobody's certain that Iona has the top-10 type guy they'll need to offset Rupp or Vaughn/Pifer or Eagon or Chelanga/McDougal (OK, kidding on that last one). Khadraeiou-and-sometimes-y made big strides last year to move up to 12th at Terre Haute, but for whatever reason, he doesn't seem to give his team that same swagger up front that those other guys do - maybe because the others look like contenders for the individual title on the right day, and no one is comparing Mo-K to Ricardo Kiplagat at this point. Sadly, he did little to dispel that notion this weekend, nosing out a win against a fella who is talented, but probably borderline All-American caliber, with a couple others who didn't even crack top-20 regionally last year close behind. Maybe Okuti will step up to hit clean-up, but it also doesn't help matters that Matthew Kiplagat is no longer listed on the Iona roster. (Bet ya didn't know that yet, huh?) Joe Parks and Chase Pizzonia ran well Saturday, and may equal Kiplagat's performance at Nationals from last season, but I'm sure Iona supporters were plugging improvement at the 5-spot into their calculations for this season.

The bottom line is this: a hypothetical 7 in before Brown and Penn State's 1st, and Navy and American's 2nd... it's quite good, but none of those teams have looked capable of making noise nationally this season in the first place, and in the second place, all Iona showed on Saturday was their depth, and unless we're talking 8-10-11-15-17-in-Terre-Haute depth, depth alone isn't even going to get you in the national title discussion.

Which leaves us at... third place. Iona were ranked 3rd pre-season and, frankly, going into the year I felt they could take home the team title if things broke right. But now...? Given the number of teams with depth 1-6 this year, I think third would be a very solid showing for the Gaels.

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Fun With Math - The Preseason NCAA Polls

The National and Regional Rankings dropped earlier this week, but really, it’s too early to quibble too much with them, as few teams have taken the reins off yet and really let their big boys race. A couple things did jump out as far as how teams related to each other last year and where they're placed now in the first poll. So let's dust off ye old transitive property and see why if A equals B, and B equals C then, A must equa- ah screw it:

> Providence graduated Martin Fagan, good for a mere 3 points at Nationals, and they don’t have any clear front-running successor. Yet the voters slotted the Friars in at 11^th, just two spots down from their 9th-place finish in 2007 at Terre Haute. Max Smith and the Oddly Skinny One, Ahmed Haji, will probably move up in the field this year, but it’s still a two-dimes-for-one-quarter situation. They could improve 20-25 each at Nationals this year, but those 50 points are going to be more than offset by the 90+ points I expect to swing against them by losing the lad from County Westmeath up front…

> … by comparison, BYU loses champ Josh Rohatinsky and plummets 8 spots in the polls from their 11^th-place showing? In addition to Fagan, Providence also lost their 5^th and 7^th men from Nationals, but not only did BYU return everyone other than the rider of Rohan, they also picked up Michigan State transfer Stephan Shay who was 108^th last year, and who looked pretty solid last week in early season action. My math es no so good, but I expect BYU to be much closer to Providence and 11^th or 12^th place.

> Louisville was 15^th, brings back #1-5 and their #7, plus 36^th place in the region, and the coaches have them… still at 15^th. Really? They won’t be ANY better? Meanwhile, NC State has a similar personnel situation – #1-4, then #6 and #7 back, plus Bobby Mack and Freddy Torres (24^th at regionals) – but the prognostications have them leaping from 16^th to 10^th. Then again, the Pack beat the Cardinals at Regionals in 2006… by a whopping 16 points. 4 teams are really going to get between these teams at Nationals? I’d use the buddy system in ranking these two until shown evidence that begs to differ.

> Now for one of the big questions of the season – will Sammy Chelanga “transfigure” Liberty into National-caliber team. Survey says… yes. You have to figure Chelanga, solidly ahead of all Southeast returners at Nationals, is good for at least top 3 in the region. Sub that 3 in for the unwieldy 123 that pushed Liberty to 7^th at regionals, and a 120 point difference would have put them 4^th last year, ahead of National Qualifier Virginia (14^th at Terre Haute). Graduation diminished William & Mary and Virginia (2 schools, not 3 people) up front, and youngster Josh Edmonds has come along nicely for the Flames, so I’d put them as a close 3^rd in the Southeast and, potentially, a top 15 team in the country. Scary.

> Finally, I don’t pretend to have any knowledge of how these poll things are put together, but Washington… 8^th in the Pacific behind Wazzu and Arizona State… 30^th in the country in the national poll… with the Cougars and Sun Devils notably absent… hmm… As a matter of fact, that happened in a couple of spots:

• NAU - 3rd in the Mountains, 20th nationally; BYU - 4th and 19th

• Iowa St. - 2nd MW, 25th nationally; Minnesota -3rd MW, 18th in all the land

• Butler - 4th GL, not ranked nationally; Michigan - 5th GL, 26th in the country

• Virginia - 5th in the Southeast, 28(tie) nationally; Liberty - 4^th in the Southeast, but NR in the US.
  

Me? I'd take Minnesota over ISU, Michigan over Butler, and, of course, you can deduce that I'd take Liberty over UVA. It's an interesting hiccup, if nothing else, but more on this in a moment.

How many bids are awarded to each region is an annual point of consternation, hand-wringing, and Oh No, They Didn'ts. Based on the polls, things would break down like so:

West - 6
Mountain - 4
Great Lakes - 4
Southeast 4
South - 3
Midwest - 3
South Central - 2 (no bonus points for guessing those without looking)
Mid-Atlantic - 2
Northeast - 2 (again, no bonus points awarded)

In other words, it looks much like last year, only sans the UTEP slight (whether real or perceived). Now, what makes no sense to me is the poll stops at 30, despite there being 31 slots at nationals. Do a top 25 like other college sports, or make it relevant to your sport and go all the way to 31... ranking 30 is utterly incomprehensible in terms of reasoning.

But now for the fun part: if we can assume that the 30 teams in the poll are expected, from a pre-season vantage, anyway, to make an appearance in SW Indiana, who is that mysterious final, 31st team? Well, going back to the discrepancies between polls, the following teams were those "sandwich" teams - caught between nationally-ranked teams in their respective regional polls, but unranked themselves: Washington State, Arizona State, Butler, and Liberty. You have to figure one of those teams is the likeliest recipient of the 31st-most votes, along with Weber State, Kansas, Iowa, EMU, Belmont, American, Lamar and Syracuse, who enter the conversation as the highest-ranked in their respective regions not to appear in the national poll. OK, maybe Syracuse and Lamar don't enter the conversation. Anyway, let's take a flier and guess blindly that Washington State is the coach's 31st place team. So congratulations, Cougars - you're 31st! You're 31st!

Of course, that would mean 7 teams coming out of the West... and if that comes to pass, my money is on the angriest fist-shaking to come from Liberty, American, Iowa and EMU.

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