A hypothetical track and field May Madness — or, geeking out on NCAA numbers
Track and field, at its core, is an individual sport. If you only pay attention when the sport is front and center at the Olympics, you may think otherwise, given the relentless emphasis on medal counts. But these are not the US basketball teams, who generally train together only for big events, or the US soccer teams, who play a lot of games outside the World Cups.
The only places you’ll find teams, as in “collections of athletes under one head coach who regularly train and compete together,” are in college and high school. Even then, though, team-vs.-team competition is secondary.
Florida, which swept the men’s and women’s titles at the recent NCAA Championships, did not compete in a single dual meet this year. They split their team between two different competitions, in Raleigh and Austin, on the same weekend in late March.
As recently as 2020, track and field guru Jesse Squire compiled the few dual or triangular or quadrangular meets in collegiate competition and came up with dual-meet rankings. Go Navy, beat Army. Go Princeton, beat Navy. (Princeton is actually quite good.)
The lack of duals is sad but understandable. Track and field isn’t baseball. Athletes don’t compete four or five times a week. They have a few big events each…
