Captain Haddock wrote:
A few flaws with the argument:
what if you have more than one team with a drop out?
what if you start with only 4 or less?
Then there's the general argument: cross country is challenging. It's not a marathon, but there is still no guarantee that any runner can finish the course. It's easy to look at Monday's runners and say that the course could have been easily jogged by any of them, but that's not always the case due to injuries and so forth.
The sport is cross-country running, not scoring cross-country meets.
If Georgetown's 5th runner didn't run the entire course, he should be DQed, and Georgetown should lose its team score.
i haven't exactly thought about this issue thoroughly of course, i just think that in certain instances in track and cross country, collegiate (and also high school) level athletes should not be forced or encouraged to meaninglessly finish a race when injured. perhaps it would be different if cross country had a time limit to allow a runner to be a scored runner, but it doesn't. to suggest that a team that qualifies for nationals couldn't have 5 people walk 6.2 miles seems pretty silly.
to respond to your particular points, there are easy ways to handle the multiple-drop out situation. off the top of my head the most fair seems to be giving every drop-out runner the worst possible score in a tie. for example, if you have 95 finishers and 5 drop-outs, all 5 drop-outs would score in 100th place.
and the starting with 4 or less is a red herring.
the thing is, there is no possible benefit to be gained by a team taking advantage of my suggested policy. you might suggest that it would encourage a coach to tell his athletes to go for broke without fear of not finishing the race. but this rule wouldn't provide a benefit for such a strategy. all it would do is protect the health of the athletes. instead of a coach forcing a dangerously exhausted athlete to walk, say, 2k, the athlete could receive any necessary medical attention immediately.
i'd suggest the same policy for the NCAA track championships. if you have an event with an 8-person final, any person injured during the race should still be given the points for finishing last. i see no harm in such a policy, as long as the athlete is barred from competing in any other event in the meet. again, it would be easy to develop a policy for multiple non-finishers. here, i'd suggest treating it as if all non-finishers tied. for example, in an 8-person final 2 people drop out, those two are treated as if they tied for 7th.
i will readily admit these aren't perfect solutions and i will also readily admit that there isn't a pressing problem, at least not with respect to cross country, because the situation arises infrequently.
it just seems to me that the NCAA would want rules protecting athletes from unnecessary injury or other medical harm. by removing the incentive for a coach to tell an injured and/or exhausted athlete to drag himself across the finish line for no practical purpose, you protect the athletes a little bit more without harming anyone.