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**tafnut** · 05-19-2004, 03:04 AM

Re: Potential entrant list for men's NCAA 400 meter event

I'm wondering how the podkam lists have errors on them. Isn't that a huge problem?

**ycn** · 05-19-2004, 03:13 AM

Re: Potential entrant list for men's NCAA 400 meter event

I was surprised to see what "appeared to be" errors, tafnut. I am not making a blanket statement here, because it could be me that is wrong.

But some of the differences were large, in some cases best marks varied by over half a second, and of course one athlete was given a teammate's time, and one was female.

The differences may only be as a result of submission errors. Coaches or whoever are supposed to submit verified marks, and if those people screw up, that may be where the differences lie. I can tell you than in some cases it was very difficult to track was the accurate results were, due to different name spellings, date differences, and generally poor recording of results on the net.

But if you want to find out something bad enough, and you are willing to take the effort and have the search skills, it's pretty amazing what you can find with a whole lot of perserverance.

I bet the compiler of those lists has to be tremendously busy right now, because the men's 400 is just a tiny slice of the results to compile.

**tandfman** · 05-19-2004, 03:57 AM

Re: Potential entrant list for men's NCAA 400 meter event

When was the last time the NCAA lists published on Monday were up to date and included all of the results from the previous weekend? It almost never happens.

Just a quick glance at the upper part of the list shows that Podkaminer was still missing some POP forms from the conference meets. I'm sure most of these apparent omissions will disppear when he updates these lists tonight or tomorrow. Why worry about this now?

In any event, NCAA lists will never match standard statistical lists because of the unusual conversion factors used by the NCAA but not by anyone else in the world. This is more of a factor indoors than outdoors, but there are still a bunch of marks shown on the NCAA lists as converted marks.

The NCAA lists should be taken for what they are--lists of athletes with performances that have been documented by POP forms and that have, in some cases, been adjusted in accordance with NCAA rules. And that is the only list that matters to the NCAA. There's not much point in doing a re-construction to figure out what the field in the NCAA would be if they accepted marks using different standards from those that they actually use.

**ycn** · 05-19-2004, 04:23 AM

Re: Potential entrant list for men's NCAA 400 meter event

All I posted were actual marks. I don't understand your comment.

Most of the errors I found were in favor of faster marks, not slower, and they didn't correlate to altitude adjustments to the marks posted. Check out a few of the discrepancies, then see if you agree with me.

I believe that the deadline for submitting marks is today, so if I am premature, then I apologize.

If the lists at rpodkam's site aren't accurate now, I'm guessing they aren't going to be anytime soon. If you read my second post in this thread, you would see that I pointed out that rpodkam might not be responsible at all for any errors in those lists.

But when you look at the regional seedings lists, look also at the marks I posted here, and then YOU make up your mind as to what is more correct. Please research before you respond though. I spent one hell of a lot of time researching my lists, so I don't think I need to be ashamed of them.

And like I previously stated, I wasn't about to spend the time to adjust marks for altitude on the basis of where they occurred. Believe it or not, I do have a life to live, and I didn't get paid for my "hobby" research.

**tandfman** · 05-19-2004, 05:20 PM

Re: Potential entrant list for men's NCAA 400 meter event

>All I posted were actual marks. I don't understand your comment.

Most of the errors I found were in favor of faster marks, not slower, and they didn't
correlate to altitude adjustments to the marks posted. Check out a few of the discrepancies, then see if you agree with me.<

I believe that the deadline for submitting marks is today, so if I am premature, then I apologize.<

The issue is not the deadline, it's the process by which the list is published. It's the same every week during the season, and almost every week, you'll see some marks that are omitted when the list is first updated on Monday but that are included when it's updated again on Tuesday. Same thing happened yesterday.

I don't have any more time than you do (probably less--I wouldn't have had time to do what you did), but just for the heck of it I took the national list that you posted and compared it with what Podkaminer posted last night. I just looked at the top 50 on the list. They were identical except that (a) he correctly listed one athlete (Robert Gill) whom you had omitted and (b) a few of the athletes showed up slower on his list than on yours because of the altitude adjustment, which is clearly indicated on his list. (I did not check the dates of performance, which don't matter at all--just the athletes and the marks. And I did it quickly and didn't double-check, so I may have made a mistake myself.)

I am not saying that his lists are always perfect--nobody puts out perfect lists all the time. It's not easy. But if you're going to do a quality check on Podkaminer, at least do it on Tuesday. And don't ignore altitude adjustments because the NCAA includes them in their qualification and seeding procedures. The real, un-adjusted times are, in this context, meaningless.

**ycn** · 05-19-2004, 05:36 PM

Re: Potential entrant list for men's NCAA 400 meter event

Actually, as far as I am concerned, the altitude adjustments for any race of 400 meters or less are worthless. They make no distiction between those athletes who are local to the altitudes where the marks occured and those who are just in town for the weekend. At shorter differences there may be a very slight benefit from reduced air pressure at altitude, but it doesn't even begin to compare to the effects of potential allowable wind.

And the policy of including marks - unadjusted marks - regardless of the wind is just flat ludicrous. If one guy posts a 10.20 against a 2 meter wind in the 100, and another guy posts a 10.19 with a 3.7 tailwind, the guy that got the tailwind is seeded higher.

Even the IAAF has more sense than that.

And my list was not a fact-check on rpodkam. I didn't put it together for any motive other than pure interest in who had the best times. Whatever controversy there might be about marks will be settled in three weeks when the NCAA meet is over, anyway.

Even though I posted the marks that I though were correct, unadjusted times, there were a number of times that I viewed with skepticism although it didn't cause me to censor those times. Most notably, I question the marks from the Pac-10 meet in the 400, because it seemed like an inordinate number of athletes posted results well above what one would expect as normal improvements of seasonal bests.

But the numbers are there, and those are the ones I posted. I'll leave my skepticism aside until we find out who really has the goods at the NCAA meet. I predict that not less than one college 400 man will be on the American Olympic team, and 2-3 is not out of the question.

**tandfman** · 05-19-2004, 06:00 PM

Re: Potential entrant list for men's NCAA 400 meter event

>Actually, as far as I am concerned, the altitude adjustments for any race of 400 meters or less are worthless. They make no distiction between those athletes who are local to the altitudes where the marks occured and those who are just in town for the weekend.<

You're implying that training at altitude makes a difference in the sprints. You may be right, but I've never heard that it does. I've always thought that the altitude effect was the same, whether you were local to the altitude or just in for a day.

>>At shorter differences there may be a very slight benefit from reduced air pressure at altitude, but it doesn't even begin to compare to the effects of potential allowable wind. And the policy of including marks - unadjusted marks - regardless of the wind is just flat ludicrous.<<

I agree. If you're going to adjust for altitude, you really should adjust for wind. The example you gave was a good one.

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