About a month ago, I was approached by an IndianaRunner contributor who wished to remain anonymous. He told me that he had a formula and a way to figure out as accurately as possible, who would and will finish where in any meet.

He has told me that he will compile preseason rankings for the top 150 athletes in each grade. Overall, he ranked and compiled results for over 4,400 athletes to get to his final number.

Here is some of the info that I received from him when he approached me explaining his idea:

The steps taken to get to the end result are this:

"1) identifying a benchmark place/time for each event, based on the volume & quality of runners in the field (which became a long multi-step process in itself) 2) assigning a race score for each race which measured every runner's seconds ahead/behind the benchmark time, 3) calculating a median of the race scores for each runner which minimizes their best and eliminates their poorest performances (sometimes training runs or anomaly results i.e. falls, lost shoes, wrong turns), and 4) ranking each runner according to their calculated median.

The plusses of the system are that it works to neutralize course differences, weather conditions, and JV vs Varsity races, etc while emphasizing head-to-head results. It also can project benchmark times over the same courses from one year to the next. By measuring +/- seconds the system does account for time-margins ahead or behind which is often more important in rankings than placings ahead or behind. In short, the system is significantly more complex than just averaging times or getting caught in the circular of A beat B, B beat C, but C beat A. I feel like it passes the common-sense test so far as where you'd think runners might be ranked who perhaps don't ever run against each other.

For the 2010 cross country season I have in my database approx 8 results apiece for the top runners out of 1280 boys in the class of 2012 (next year's incoming seniors), plus 1307 incoming juniors, 1190 incoming sophomores, and 640 incoming freshmen, where it's a bit more cumbersome to track down jr high race results. All in all, nearly 21,000 times from around 350 invitationals and dual/tri/quad meets have been logged in. As the project took a few turns along the way and was a moving work in process, the formatting/labeling isn't quite as uniform as is ideal, and as uniform as I would hope to make it for the upcoming season. But I learned a lot along the path. "

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So there you have it. I know I had to read it a few times over to understand it. I'll admit, I was skeptical at first, but I had to give this guy a chance. He was basically telling me that he had a better way to rank individuals rather than just guestimating on who has beat who and who has run fast where.

For now, I am posting the preseason rankings in each grade that he has given. I have talked to him about using his system to "mock out" some of the bigger meets like Flashrock, New Prairie, Culver, Semi-State, and State.

So stay tuned and look out for new rankings from Anonymous Statitcian. We will see how we can use his formula to predict the 2011 XC Season.

Thanks and feel free to discuss the new system!