Van, how did you not pick up on that? I would've back in the 7th grade. Excellent satire, made a good point. The whole culture of running reminds me of Van, just a lame person who probably is a robotic reactionary apsberger type of person. Being a runner why do i hate 90 percent of my own crowd...rigid,humorless,white bread type of personalities. "Uhh, excuse me sir, uhh, the whoop de whoops make it cross country and its muddy, we runners are tough!" sigh...no, the race is terrible, and i could care less about footlocker. If the results are that which contenders are coming in the 60s-80s, there is a problem, along with the point that it is also a combination of they stop caring after the first mile and just coast it in. NNX has been around for years already its not young, even though the course makes it inherently tougher for runners to duplicate results from their regionals like in a normal post season(ie a runner from their state who does good in regionals, does good in state), I believe it is still further away acounting for the hard demand of the course.
So in the end, a runner coming into the race thinks this:"ok, 90% of the nations HS runners are here, footlocker is still the best individual race, but nike is trying to change that. It is still not taken as seriously as footlocker because everybody in the running culture(msg boards,coaches,culture) still holds FL in a higher regard. If i start out and am not doing as good as I like, and I qualified for FL and I am good, I can coast it in,not get injured on a dangerous course, and do good next week" NXN is for the people who came in 11-30 at FL to have a 2nd chance at "the best" competition in the post season.