national lookout

National Rankings Snapshots Gleaned from Tully Runners

Following Week of Saturday, September 22

Rating the performances of cross-country runners and teams has always been a bit of a boggle. Sure, Joe Fleetfeet won the Zippitydoo Invitational by 10 seconds and his Speedemon team cruised to a 20-point win, but how does that compare to Henry Hillhurdler's dominating performance for the Solecrushers at the Mountaintopper Challenge in the next state over? Unlike track where the differences in conditions for any 3200 races are relatively close, the variables for XC races include the distance, terrain, surface types, congestion factors, and competition makeup plus a range of weather and ground considerations for that day that include humidity, heat, wind, rain, snow, and course sponginess, to name a few.

Even if an XC performance evaluator could somehow get accurate and unbiased data for every racing factor for every major meet in the country (clearly impossible), it would still not account for all the changes that can occur during a day that opens with Race A setting off in perfect conditions and Race H running in a pizza oven. So how do you grab all the nasty migraine miseries flying around for XC meet evaluator and stuff them all back into one fairly tidy box?

As Bill Meylan of NY-based Tully Runners discovered more than a decade ago, the answer is to let the runners do all the work of filtering the race variables for you. Take any course that is in the 5K or 3-mile range (the system can do 2.5 mile courses also, but is not as accurately calibrated for them), and then build a database of results for a given set of runners and teams. Once you have a history of their results to compare, you can assign number scores to the perfomances at a meet and create a huge repository of ratings linking together every runner in the nation as long as they have run in a scored race. The scores have a general grounding in a race course's own history of times for past meets, so most runners will improve their scores as they ramp down their times during the season. NY runners also have an overall average score based on all their scores for the season, though recent meets get factored in more heavily.

Over the years, Bill has expanded his scope from the home team following the exploits of Tully legend Lopez Lomong, to the local section, then state, region, and the entire country, plus some Canadian kids, and this was partly fueled by the national successes of some nearby teams such as Fayetteville-Manlius. The Tully Runners speed ratings (TR) computation system is quite extensive and gets more comprehensive as the season progresses and Bill steals some minutes from his job to plug in the results of a big race in Idaho or Kansas. At this time of year, maybe 70% of the top teams in the nation have competed in a race scored by Tully Runners, but once the second week in October rolls around and I'm franticly trying to pull together team ratings for the national crowd heading to the Manhattan Invitational, I can depend on finding results for every team in the elite Eastern States meets. The team scores can be used as highly accurate predictors of race results, though like the team average time measure at a meet you still have to look at factors such as team balance details so that you don't give a highly skewed squad too much love.

No XC ratings system is perfect, and I have been churlish enough to complain to Bill like many other local guys who feel that he should make scoring adjustments for a meet  because the archrival team got to run in an invitational's Easy Street race while our guys had to go in the Tempest from Muddy Hell race an hour later. But as Bill says, it all gets rounded off and squared away over the course of a season, so just calm down and enjoy the action.

The only big drawback to the TR system that I can see is that once you have run a race and been scored for the database, you are trapped there forever. The TR remembers everything you've ever done, and just like the coach who has a stopwatch for a brain and remembers your exact time in the county championship last year, if you run a tenth of a second slower this year he will give you sad pained looks for the rest of the season and mutter "I guess you just somehow didn't want it that much" as you finish your 20th interval at the next practice. But with the TRs, you can always hope that your miserably slow time was due to the same stiff headwind that blew in the faces of all the runners, and maybe you'll actually get a raise from a 170 to a 171.

The tables below will be updated at points throughout the season, and the results here are from meets of the weekends of Saturday, September 15 and 22. As mentioned, there are are still a large number of top teams that have not been scored in a meet yet, and some teams have still not run in any big events. The team scores are a relative overview snapshot of the strength of some of the top teams early in the season and are not meant to be any type of rankings. There are likely at least a half dozen teams that could be on both the boys and girls lists based on previous results this season if the meets had been scored. In some cases, a team listed here has placed a little behind a team with a smaller TR below it at the same meet, thus it had a better average time but got edged out in the meet's score.

Each TR point is equivalent to approximately 3 seconds in a 5K race, so a girls team with a 125 TR score appears to have about a 30 second overall time differential for the top 5 runners over a team that has a 115 TR. The Top 5 spread shows how a team is balanced, and generally a top guy's team with a 190-180-170-165-165 breakdown will be at a disadvantage against a more packed but lower TR scoring team at 180-175-171-170-170. HM is Honorable Mention and NR is Not Ranked.