Simeon Birnbaum 3rd!!!

I Know he is good, but he is NOT the Best in the NCAA YET at least not in Cross Country

Sergio Del Barrio was 47th with 24,26

Why do you ignore the European Steeplechase u20 champion?

He ran 1:47 in his only attempt with a big negative split.

Impressive race by Birnbaum and some other "kids." Coaches sometimes redshirt frosh in the first and second meets to see how they will do at the longer distance. If it looks like they will be top 5 or will contribute, they drop the redshirt and becomes scorers for the big meets.

IIRC, Schumacher said he would only run the freshmen that he believes could be All-Americans.

Steury was in the low 60s at NCAA XC as a true freshman*

*a non-redshirt freshman.

I think Stanford has no one at #5, and who knows if Leo and Lex will both perform.
I think if all the transfers come through, Oregon could podium this year, so they better put Birnbaum in. If Nico can get 4th and Cole Sprout could get 14th their freshman years, why couldn't Birnbaum do some real damage?

Also, how hard is it for 800 runners like that guy from Idaho (Lorenzz Herman), Aiden from Cal Poly, and Elliott Cook to run 10k?

Another thing:
Hopefully they have another race on their calendar before conferences, so he has some more data on who to redshirt and who to keep. This is the kind of case for a more robust regular season.

And I think Birnbaum can beat Quincy Norman easily too.:

As a fan, I don't like seeing the top-picked freshman get redshirted, but as an athlete and coach I would get it. Not only does that extra year allow the athlete to assimilate to the new training demands, but it can also give them better career prospects coming out of college assuming they keep improving over those 5 years.

Don't miss it! From my 70 some years as a fan, this is the most exciting and portentous high school race ever, with Rupp, Kiptoo, True, McDougall and others all-out on the hilly iconic Balboa course and an utterly surprising winner.

It's hard to make much from a meet like this, especially this early in the season. Oregon had no competition. The only other solid program at the race was Portland. Either Portland rested their best athletes or they're heavily overrated.

Maybe Oregon will be a decent team this year. But competition for the podium is stacked this year. It'll all depend on how their top 5 do against top tier competition. But NAU, OK State and BYU are all on a completely different level at this point.

In Virginia today NAU clobbered a slew of top 25 teams while resting a bunch of runners. BYU looked very good(although clearly not in NAU's stratosphere) without their top 2. OK state has a bevy of all-Americans returning from a team that lost a tie-breaker to NAU last year.

Yes! I’m 1 of the 2 “shirtless yahoos” around the 2.5 mile mark. Classic.

No one was ignored. I was looking for Oregon athletes and if they were unattached and I hadn't heard of them, I didn't include them. He sounds like a good one, but not for xc this year. No Oregon freshman is going to compete for the squad this year who can't finish in their top seven, and maybe not then either.

Idaho's Lorenz Herrmann has run 1:46.90.

Stanford has a fifth man. The questions for them have to do with a poor track record for the coaching staff at NCAA's, relative to season performance, and their reliance on two freshman to make a major impact. They lost the national champion to the pros. They have guys 1-7 who will run incredible in-season times. If the Youngs are as good as we think they are, they should be top 20, maybe even top ten like their brother Nico, though that is incredibly difficult nowadays. Robinson and Sprout need to be healthy but both should contend for top five spots and Robinson might win it all. So, that is four potential low sticks, two locks with health. The fifth guy comes from a collection of really fast guys who just have to do it when it counts. Boyden, 13:37/28:44, 7th at Pac-12, 21st at West Region, and Stanford's 5th man at nationals, would be my pick coming into the season. Evan Burke is fast, 13:38i last year, 25th at West Regional but 7th for the team at NCAAs. Robert DiDonato has run 13:44/29:26 and was Pac-12 Freshman of the year. There are other talented guys as well who could rise. NAU gets guys like Santiago Gomez-Prosser, relative unknowns, to top 20 and top 30 performance. Stanford needs to get more out of its talented crop of runners at nationals. But they do a great job with providing bios and stats on their website, unlike Oregon, which still has nothing on most of them. Thanks, Jerry, for showing that you care.

Now that the UVA invite has taken place, I am going to add an update. Zane Bergen, the Sherry brothers, Evan Burke, and Liam Anderson tempoed their 9/1 race in 25:25, back in the pack. And Nolan Topper ran 28. But today at UVA, Ky Robinson was 3rd in a very quick 23:29 behind Drew Bosley (23:20) and Parker Wolfe. Leo Young was next in 46th in 23:58, 38 seconds back, Cole Sprout was only 62nd, 24:05, hopefully tempoing (coming back from injury? he fell 33 spots (from where?) in the results during the race, so probably not coming back from injury and out of shape), Lex Young was 75th in 24:12 (rising 15 spots), Bergen was 90th in 24:20, Callum Sherry was 110th in 24:30, Burke was 120th in 24:35, DiDonato 140th in 24:45, Liam Anderson 155th in 24:53. So, a lousy day for Stanford and a big spread for the team, but maybe they're trying to take it slow and ramp up this year to peak at the right time for once. NAU, meanwhile, without Nico Young and Hasty, had a 24 second spread, a 30 point victory over BYU, and 5 in the top 25, with a very nice performance from Theo Quax in sixth, a contender again for the national title in Bosley, good work from Nyoak and Gorgas, and signs that Prosser's performance last year was no fluke.

It makes a lot of sense at a home meet to run anyone unattached who hasn't used a redshirt yet (even if they are clearly in your top 7). No sense burning a shirt on a kid when it is easy for them to run unattached in case something happens. If birnbaum gets diagnosed with a stress fracture next week and has to miss the season, they would have regretted burning the season for a relatively meaningless home meet.

The real question is do you take it off later in the season based on how your team looks. We saw this with NAU and Colin sahlman.

John Wesley is giving away a 7:50 3K for Birnbaum? What did he run for two miles?

8:34 full 2 miles with a 55 second close

Bigger deal to see that Jenna Hutchins is alive