Another way 2 look at it wrote:
Correct me if I am mistaken but if you take all of the best teams in the nation (minus F-M) at NXN and took their combined top seven as a single team, wouldn't that qualify as something of a national-level all star team?
Well, the idea of what constitutes a "high school all star team" is a little up in the air, but let's just arbitrarily use the top 21 cross-country runners (up through an imaginary "3rd team") as a cutoff. This includes all runners, not just those on teams (errr, clubs) at NXN and includes all runners not at NXN. These top 21 runners will most likely occupy the lion's share of spots on the top 10 lists in the 1,600/mile and 3,200/2M in the spring. So a top 10 spot on a yearly distance list in track is also a reasonable cutoff for "all star" status (you'll see why I included track times in a bit).
At the NXN championship, the F-M runners placed 2nd, 4th, 6th, 16th, 29th, 96th and 107th overall. If we score F-M vs. the rest of the field, we find F-M with a score of 2-4-6-16-29 = 57 and the rest of the field scoring 1-3-5-7-8 = 24. So F-M didn't in fact beat even the non-F-M NXN all stars, and this doesn't take into account that on the girls' side, more of the top individuals opted out of NXN to focus on FLCC. At NXN, you had no Aisling Cuffe, Allie Woodward, Gabrielle Anzalone, Megan Venables, K&E Fluehr, Molly Grabill, Julie Nacouzi, Maddie Meyers, Abbey Leonardi, etc. You'd think most (if not all) of those would be on at least a 3rd-team all-star cross-country squad for 2010 and would certainly make a huge dent in the top 20 at NXN, probably knocking the F-M runners back between 3 and 10 spots each. Then there's Sarah Baxter, regarded as one of the top few elites in the country, who isn't (wasn't) running either NXN or FLCC.
So it stands to reason the 5th F-M runner (29th overall at NXN) would be doing well to be in the top 50 (given an equal effort to the one at NXN) in a championship which included all of the nation's best runners. They would still win the team title in such a meet, and their team score might not be much higher than the 27 it was at NXN, since most of the runners who would split up their top 5 would either not be on teams or would have little to no backup if they were on teams (i.e., most of the top teams actually were at NXN and few other teams would have 2nd runners in the top 50 in a huge national meet). Yes, F-M is dominant at the high school level.
It's largely SWAG, but I'm thinking F-M would probably have 3 runners on a 21-deep all star cross-country team, perhaps with none on the "1st team" (top 7). Their 4th and 5th would end up in the 35 to 50 range at best in a race against all the best in the country. There are actually probably a lot more runners than that who would push back the F-M 4 & 5 if we added the top 25 or so runners from each FL region to one national championship race against the NXN teams. But that's just more SWAG.
Since we can't broadly compare high school cross runners to college cross runners on a head-to-head basis (there are a few individuals who run at races like US Juniors), the easiest way to draw comparisons of ability is with track times. Everybody runs the 1,500/1,600/mile and the 3,000/3,200/2M at some point in the winter or spring. The sheer number of performances allows for a more reasonable comparison between the depth of high school running vs. college running.
I'm not going to pore through every roster of every team that made NCAAs this year to compile all the track times, then make some guess at how fast those times would convert to 3,200 times, but I'm saying without too much fear of error that every one of those teams had 5 runners who could break 10:20 for 3,200 (that's close to 9:40 for 3,000 and is "worth" about 16:45 for 5,000 based on depth charts). If for some reason they do have a mediocre 4th or 5th runner who couldn't do that, in order to make NCAAs, they had to have had a couple of Van Dalen types way up there to offset their poor depth. Sure, somebody's going to point out more exceptions - Rice, for example, didn't have 5 sub-16:45s, with the top cross runner (Nicole Mericle) having an official track PR of 16:52, but Mericle was beating a 16:11 runner on the team, so a little common sense says Rice does in fact have 5 runners who could smoke 10:20 for 3,200 if they chose to. This represents a time that is usually near the top 20 in the country at the high school level. And where did we figure F-M's 4th and 5th runners stood in the national pecking order? Certainly no better than 16th and 29th (their actual places in a race which was sans at least 10 of the top 25 runners) and probably no better than 35th and 50th (which is probably being generous if the top 250 high school runners got together for one big race).
Wait, I've almost forgotten the topic of this post. Oh yeah - it's about F-M defeating a "high school all star team" at NXN. Well, they're the best school, no doubt. They beat the other teams, but the field as a whole there beat them easily and if we add in all the no-shows, it would probably be a rout after F-M's top 3 came in. It seems like they could put 3 in the top 20-ish spots on a banner day, but their team as a whole falls off a bit after that and plummets completely after number 5. Looking at track times, it would likewise be shocking if F-M had more than 3 of the top 21 distance runners in the country (certainly unlikely they get a combined 5 in the top 10 of the 1,600 and 3,200 yearly lists). It's highly probable that there are at least 50 college teams that could put up those numbers, though, so those comparisons aren't really realistic or fair.