Rethinking Collegiate Regionals and Nationals

Recently Texas A&M head coach Pat Henry was interviewed by Flotrack about last weekend's NCAA preliminary rounds, and he did not have nice things to say about it. He said it was bad for track & field. This was discussed at Let's Run, and I responded by saying "by which he means 'bad for Pat Henry'."

I said this because I've heard the same coaches bitching about whatever regionals system we've had ever since they were put into place in 2003. And most people with important jobs in D-I athletic programs are nakedly self-serving, as it's an unwritten portion of the job description. (Personally, I think the constant airing of complaints is also bad for college track, as sportswriters and potential spectators are told that there's no reason to pay attention to the regional meets. We need to encourage attention, not discourage it.)

But, unusual for Let's Run, the ensuing discussion was illuminating and productive. As I read and thought and looked at the evidence, I came to the conclusion that Pat Henry really is in favor of emphasizing team competition. All of Texas A&M's home meets were scored in one way or another, and Henry brought his team to one of the few outdoor scored invitationals, the Pepsi Challenge in Eugene. Furthermore, it has been said that he suggested a team championship at the nationals eerily similar to one I recently proposed--one that would be much more difficult for his teams to win than our current national championship system.

The prevailing opinion, though, is that we won't be arguing about regionals any longer because a new proposal has gained near-universal acceptance among the coaches. Dubbed the "Wilson Plan", after the Minnesota coach who came up with it, it takes 32 athletes in each event directly to the nationals, some by virtue of marks and some by virtue of winning their conference championships. It's thought that this will be what we do next year.

I wouldn't presume that regionals are dead, though. No one would have predicted we'd have this year's system. I think I'm beginning to understand the thought processes of the NCAA Championshisp Cabinet, the group from whence it came. You see, in every other sport, there is some system of playoffs or regional competition leading into the NCAA championship. You can actually see some form of what the NCAA's administrators want when you look at these nifty brackets. The assumption that outdoor track & field, which is relatively important among the NCAA's 23 different sports, would be allowed to be different just because the coaches want it that way defies the "logic" of large bureaucracies.

I think we're going to have some form of regional competition for a long time. What we have now is very hard to follow, because there are "playoff brackets" for forty different events. Following those are complex and time-consuming. Neither do they address the issue that team competition is what drives interest in college track, and right now we have little more than a huge collection of individual competitions.

What kind of regional competition could heighten the importance of team competition, make regionals truly interesting, and yet not stifle the individual competition portion of track & field? I've got a few ideas.

We could use Henry's combination team/individual championship plan in the old four-region format. In each region, eight teams would qualify for the regionals based on either winning one of eight to twelve major conferences or by the results of scored meets during the season. Another sixteen athletes in each event would qualify as individuals based on whatever criteria we want, most likely a descending-order list.

Those eight teams would be allowed two athletes per event, and team scores would be tallied among those athletes only, much as we do in cross country. At the end of the meet, the top two teams qualify to the nationals, along with the top four athletes in each event not on qualifying teams. At the national championships we'd repeat the system.

In what way would this make things more interesting? The team scores at regionals would be hugely important. Finish third and you can't compete for the NCAA Championship. But more importantly, getting your team to the regionals would require competing in a few scored meets during the regular season.

Going into regionals, we'd then have an NCAA Championships selection show for track & field, as the NCAA does for about twenty other sports. National team rankings would be based not on a bunch of arithmetic as we do now, but on actual results of actual meets. Who won a meet would be the headline because it would really mean something (and because there would be a winner).

A minor technical point: I don't think I'd have the decathlon/heptathlon be part of the regionals or the team scoring. For one reason, it's not reasonable to ask a full multi-event competition out of a young athlete three times in five weeks (conference, regional, national). But also, provided that the multis are completed before the rest of the nationals begin, a decent multi-event athlete can have a big impact in an eight-team meet by scoring in several events. We want to promote this kind of team heroism, not reduce it.

So who would have qualified this year? Assuming that at least a few team-scoring meets would have been part of everyone's schedule, here's who I would have predicted for each of the old four regions. Auto qualifiers are noted.

East
Florida (SEC champ)
Florida State (ACC champ)
UConn (IC4A champ)
South Carolina
Georgia
Virginia
Virginia Tech
North Carolina
I don't think there's much doubt about which two teams would get to the nationals here, as Florida and Florida State are far better than the rest.

Mideast
Notre Dame (Big East champ)
LSU
Auburn
Mississippi
Mississippi State
Wisconsin
Ohio State
Louisville
LSU would get to the nationals easily, and I think Auburn would likely be second over Wisconsin.

Midwest
Nebraska (Big 12 champ)
Minnesota (Big 10 champ)
Houston (C-USA champ)
Wichita State (MVC champ)
Oklahoma
Texas A&M
Texas Tech
Baylor
This would be a dogfight between Nebraska, Oklahoma and Texas A&M.

West
Oregon (Pac-10 champ)
BYU (Mountain West champ)
Utah State (WAC champ)
Southern Cal
Stanford
Arizona State
UCLA
Cal State Northridge
Oregon and Southern Cal would have a pretty easy time of this, despite the fact that BYU is a very good team.

Let's Run Innovation

Let's Run has stopped waiting for other people to make it and went and did it themselves.

They've got a daily "Fan Guide" of info about featured races at the Mt. SAC Relays, and embedded the live Flocast coverage in their page. I'm watching today's right now. Very cool.

Now, if Apple will just update the iPhone operating system so I can watch it wherever I am...

April Fool's Day

A roundup of the best April Fool's Day track articles...
S.C. runner ticketed for running too fast
President Obama Rips Ultra Successful Nike Oregon Project
Texas runner trains with cheetah
Athletics World Worried As Bolt Leaves Club Early
Oregon runners sprint to Idaho
Russian Officials Question Effectiveness Of Drug Doping
Indiana runner going to the dogs
UK Athletics And USATF Vow Never Again To Send Male Teams To IAAF World Cross-Country Championships
BAA Lowers Boston Marathon Qualifying Times

As usual, the Let's Run stuff is a bit more biting humor.

Curtis Beach

Way down the page in Let's Run's weekly recap, they compare Curtis Beach's high school decathlon record to Roman Sebrle's world record. Not a valid comparison; Sebrle was 26 years old when he set that record.

A more valid comparison is with an up-and-coming decathlete who was also an age-group ace. Andrey Krauchenka of Belarus is #3 on the all-time junior (under-20) list. Marks for Krauchenka are first, Beach second.

100m: 11.09 / 11.05
LJ: 7.46 / 7.19
SP: 14.51 / 11.00
HJ: 2.00 / 2.04
400m: 48.98 / 47.96
110H: 14.55 / 14.77
DT: 43.45 / 32.96
PV: 4.50 / 4.70
JT: 52.34 / 42.13
1500: 4:28.46 / 4:25.40

Beach leads in five of the ten events (blue), but where he's behind (red) it's huge--ten feet in the shot, 35 in the disc, 30 in the jav. Fortunately, those are the events where large improvements are possible. If he can become an adequate thrower, he's going to be a monster.

Weekend Update

There's news, and then there's analysis of the news. The internet and its blogs and non-traditional reporting has allowed the latter to thrive. Here are four great examples from the last week.

1) Kenenisa Bekele gets beaten in Edinburgh XC
And not by a little bit, either--he was fourth, some 150 meters behind the winners. It's safe to say he hasn't been beaten like this in years. What, exactly, does it mean? He partly blamed missed training while in Edinburgh due to snow and ice, but it's not possible to put any shine on this turd. He ran poorly, and beat no one of note.

I do world rankings in each event using a points system, and recently got the system up and running for the 2010 season. It has Bekele at #2 for the 3k-5k category, and I thought "Huh, that's weird. It'll correct itself soon enough." Maybe it was right, and my assumption that he's invincible was wrong.

2) World 10k champ Linet Masai inexplicably forced out of Abu Dhabi half marathon by AK
The Zayed International half marathon is a huge payday, by far the biggest for a non-marathon race. Masai, one of the world's best runners, probably would have finished second and walked away with $100,000. But on the eve of the race she was not granted the release necessary by Athletics Kenya, with no explanation, and didn't get to run. Let's Run speculates as to why, and it sounds just about right. It's the same kind of stuff that made Steve Prefontaine apoplectic, but with sexism thrown in to boot.

3) College track IS concerned with pleasing fans
By the way things go at nearly all college meets, you'd figure this was the last thing college coaches are worried about. In a discussion at the Track & Field News forums about the recently-released NCAA technical manual and exactly how the idiotic new regionals system works, westcoasttiger had this to say:

At the USATFCCA convention group leader (and the force behind this crappy new qualifying albatross) Sam Seemes speaks to the entire coaching group about how the collegiate nationals in xc, indoor and outdoor are struggling to put butts in the stands compared to various other sports. This system is certainly taking things the opposite direction. The ONLY way to bring more fans to the stands is to bring legitimate drama to the meets via real competition and most importantly creating a true TEAM aspect to the sport. Seemes spoke of how lacrosse, water polo, gymnastics, tennis, softball and soccer were kicking track's butt in attendance and revenue. Well the draw for those sports is each has a true team focus even tennis and gymnastics which are not inherently team sports.

He then goes on to give some pretty good ideas about how to fix the problem, citing collegiate swimming's setup as one to emulate. The real point, of which I was not aware, is that other so-called "minor" sports are concerned with getting (paying!) butts in the seats and track is not...or at least the concern is one where, as usual, track people see themselves as individuals first and foremost, and "herding cats" is not a strong enough metaphor.

Another issue not spoken of, but which must be on some coaches' minds, is the increase in regional cable sports TV outlets such as the Big Ten Network. Track lags far behind these other "minor" sports in getting itself on the air, and for the same reasons as cited above. Doubtless this is why powerhouse programs like Arkansas, Texas and Texas A&M are now scheduling dual meets, which are the only regular-season competitions suitable for TV coverage.

4) USATF isn't fan-friendly either
Duh. But T&FN's editor Garry Hill points out how. Analyzing the recently-released USATF Indoor Championships meet schedule, he sees an average time gap between running events of over ten minutes--and that's in the Sunday "prime-time" live TV portion of the program. The common critiques of baseball and soccer is that basically nothing happens during most of the competition, but this meet schedule really does pack 18 minutes of action into an hour and 45 minutes.

Two things jump out at me while reading this. The first is that no one cares about keeping the meet moving along. It's not just scheduling things so far apart, it's the entire idea of how to schedule a meet. If you want to tightly schedule a meet, you run the risk of clipping off warmup time for athletes in the next event, but not if you think creatively. Since the straightaway races of 60 meters and 60 hurdles and the multi-lap races of 400 and up use different surfaces, you simply alternate between them. Example: 1500 goes first, during which the hurdlers do their final warmups, then the hurdles, during which the 400 runners do their final warmups, and so on. Outdoors it gets a bit more complex, but there's still no reason the 1500 runners can't warm up during the 100, since they use opposite ends of the track.

Secondly, this is the kind of critical analysis that must get a wide airing if the sport is to correct itself. Track and field is often described as "insular", and a "wide airing" is a relative term here, but I'd guess for the most part the USATF bigwigs take it as important if it's in the pages of T&FN and not if it isn't. In the piece on Linet Masai, Johnson describes how USATF has gone probably too far in terms of satisfying athlete concerns over the good of the sport as a whole. A prominent editorial in T&FN about this poor scheduling, explaining while being good for the athletes in the short-term it makes for ever-decreasing fan interest, and how the livelihoods of professional athletes are wholly dependent on said fan interest, might have a chance to make a difference. Griping on a message board, no matter how justified, won't make a difference.

Bad Running Movies

I'm a fan of so-bad-they're-good movies, such as Can't Stop The Music. If you do too, you may want to check out this discussion thread.

It sounds as though the one most up my alley is Courage, a sort of Deliverance with ultrarunners in the southwestern desert.

Six at Eleven

RW Daily News has all the headlines, including Gateshead and Zagreb track results.

Let’s Run looks back on the week.

Berlin is looking at a long-term Olympic bid.

Who is the world’s most dominant athlete: Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt, Tiger Woods, or Roger Federer?

Scott Bush continues discussing a USATF road race series.

Threadspotting: What’s the next world record?

World Championships Fantasy League

There are three online contests that I know of: Let's Run's prediction contest, USATF's Pick N' Win contest, and the IAAF's Fantasy Athletics.

My other responsibilities are ramping up, so I'm only playing one. The first two are straight pick-em games and not terribly interesting. The IAAF's game includes a bit of strategy and therefore more intriguing.

The rules: You pick 20 athletes--10 men and 10 women--and one team in each of the four relays. You get points for place with bonuses for world and meet records. The twist is that each athlete must be from a different country, and the same for each relay. You can drop an athlete and pick up a new one (forfeiting points already earned in the process), but only one per day.

I cribbed winner picks from Track & Field News and Let's Run and tried to be smart about it. I went with strong favorites from small countries, such as Kristian Pars and Valerie Vili. I went with athletes picked to win two events, such as Kenenisa Bekele and Usain Bolt, figuring they were more or less guaranteed to win at least one. And then I picked athletes from big countries who were favorites to win events held early on in the championships, such as Sanya Richards, figuring I could swap them out for other favorites later on should they fail to win gold.

Worlds Previews

I was out of the loop for several days, taking my team on a training camp.

Today I see that Let's Run has deep previews of every event in the upcoming World Championships. Indexed to results, organized both by event and by day, the whole shebang. Damn!

LATE EDIT: They also have a fantastic men's hammer throw preview. Best I've ever read. Seriously.

Progression of World Records

Over at Let's Run there's a thread titled Progression of World Records seems to be screeching to a holt [sic]. There's some pretty good discussion mixed in with the usual idiocy. As usual, the numbers on their face must be viewed with some perspective. (My wife knows a stats prof who doesn't plan some of his lectures, but rather opens up USA Today and says "what claptrap are they peddling this time?")

First off, there used to be more world records set because there were more events. Up through 1976 the IAAF had metric and imperial running events in everything, whereas now the only non-Frenchy distance we do is the mile. Even if you only consider the metric distances way back when, you have to realize that they were often "weak" records in relation to their imperial counterparts. The metric records weren't often "maxed-out" by an American because he might run that distance just a few times in a four-year period. There's also the issue of tieing records, which was common in the era of tenth-of-a-second timing.

Records were often thrown out and not ratified due to various insufficiencies: not enough timers, a venue that was downhill or a track that was an inch or two short, and so forth. These seem trivial now, but it wasn't so long ago that people had to put down lane lines and so forth by hand with chalk, and getting it just exactly right was no easy task.

Another thing that has changed is the population we're drawing from. Prior to WWII, the world of athletics was pretty much the USA, Europe, and the white portions of the British Empire. Neither China, the Soviet Union, or the vastness of Latin America and Africa were part of the scene.

All of these things changed at once in the 70s and 80s, along with an accelerated inclusion of women and an explosion in the use of drugs. Anti-doping efforts have really gotten somewhere in the last few years, and all these other changes--wider population, better equipment, standardization, longer careers through professionalization--have reached a point of stasis. No new things, fewer new records.

Let's Run Still Getting Better

It still makes me shake my head every time I think about it, but Let's Run is growing into one of the premier track news sites on the internet. They've got an Ethiopian correspondent now, and "[i]n his first piece, he catches up with Dibaba at practice and also sees Sihine, Defar and others."

All on a website so primitive it doesn't even have an RSS feed.

Let's Run, SportsCenter

The day after the Lausanne Super GP meet, Usain Bolt's 19.59 run in the rain made SportsCenter's top ten plays. The lead in was a snyde, but funny, remark: "What's the only thing more boring than track? Field."

Needless to say, this ticked off quite a few people. The Brojos did a little digging and found out the background and interests of the anchor who said it, John Anderson. You'd be surprised. Very surprised.

The Week In Review

Weldon and Robert Johnson's Week That Was feature is usually pretty good, but this week's installment is an excellent analysis of all angles of last week's USATF championships. It may be their best one yet.

Distance Training Theory

Let's Run was once a fantastic resource for serious distance runners. The home page is now a pretty good (if amateurish) place to follow professional and college track, but the "world-famous" message board has basically jumped the shark (and admittedly, yours truly has contributed to its downfall).

It's still worth following, because every now and then you get some really good discussions going on. One concerns the implications of Tim Noakes' Central Governor Theory on training, with the general consensus that theories have no place in developing a training regimen; practical experience, both personal and collective, is the key.

In another thread, on the usefulness (or not) of slower recovery runs, one poster gets to the basic misinterpretation of modern exercise phys that Noakes' theory seeks to address:

I agree with the idea of doing the easy days real EASY. But, me and some friends have been wondering: Why should it be running?

When running slow, my form is nothing at all like when I run fast. According to the principle of specificity, I'm not training the right muscles when I run slow and I'd be just as well suited to ride a bike or something. It will pound my legs less, and the motion is no further away from my racing form as slow running is (although it's different than slow running).

There's got to be something wrong with that logic, so someone point it out....

Perhaps the answer is this: Running is a lot about managing and transferring impact forces. Slow running may not look like fast running but it still could be training your body to deal with impact forces (just in a softer, lighter way) that biking/pool running never can. Even the lighter impact forces from slow running are still training many of the same muscles used when handling the harder impact of fast running. So, even if I'm shuffling, the "right" muscles in my quads are firing and the right muscles are still getting capillarized/mitochondria development etc.

(emphasis added)

The poster's final point shows just how strong a hold the traditional Aerobic/Cardiovascular Theory has on most runners. Even though this guy has hit on the important idea of impact in running, he still wants to attach it to factors associated with VO2max. But Noakes reports that runners who are the best at managing and transferring impact forces have the best economy--that is, their racing performance is far better than predicted by their VO2max.

And, most tellingly, the most efficient runners also tend to do the most milage...and milage is the mantra of Let's Run, which has revolutionized American running as of late. It's not that exercise physiology is useless so much as the scientists are way behind the coaches in terms of observation and knowledge.

From a practical perspective, knowing why high milage makes us better runners doesn't matter. If, however, your brain can't tolerate such ambiguity, you probably realize there's a combination of increased capilarization/mitochondrial action and increased neurological efficiency. I'd be willing to bet there's yet another issue in play that no one ever talks about. To really understand it, we shouldn't look to exercise science but food science.

The best learning tool for that kind of science is a series on the Food Network called Good Eats. It's a cooking show with a plot and recurring characters and...well, you just have to see it. The host, Alton Brown, makes a point of teaching the viewer about the structure of the food to be prepared. When it comes to animal flesh, this includes learning about types and relative amounts of connective tissue that permeate the muscle in question.

Here's the interesting part. In general, the more an animal used the muscle, the more connective tissue that muscle contains. This stuff makes meat tough and rubbery (until, of course, it is cooked using the right technique). From my perspective, it only stands to reason that humans follow the same pattern.

A runner who puts in multitudes of triple-digit weeks would develop a greatly increased amount of connective tissue within the respective leg muscles. Since footstrike involves a great deal of eccentric muscle deformation and reformation, the runner with more collagen, reticulin and elastin in his muscles simply uses less muscular effort to propel himself forward and bounces off the road like a well-inflated ball.

Bullshit? Maybe. But at least I'm thinking.

Proof of Idiocy

Buried down at the end of Let's Run's weekly update was this item:

Proof that 19% of the world's population is idiotic:
19% of Britains Want an Olympic Boycott

All this proves is that getting a degree from a fancy private Eastern college doesn't mean you actually got an education. First off, Britain is an island which is inhabited by Britons. Secondly, you cannot extrapolate results from a poll of said Britons to the rest of the world. Finally, it only shows that 19% of said Britons are more concerned with foreign policy towards China than Olympic sports--and you'd probably find at least as large a portion that likes, for example, peanut butter more than Olympic sports.

Sheesh. Dumb jocks.