VERONA, WISCONSIN, September 27 — It wouldn’t be totally unreasonable to see the men’s Nuttycombe Invitational results as a possible harbinger of things to come 8 weeks hence in the NCAA for both team champ BYU and individual titlist Parker Wolfe of North Carolina.
Yet, those same results — with Ed Eyestone’s No. 2-ranked squad scoring a measly 48 points off a 4-6-8-9-17 finish to secure a 64-point edge over a very good No. 5-rated Iowa State team (108 points off a 5-19-22-29-33) — are waaaaaaaay too early to make prognostications, predictions or suppositions. BYU put on a clinic, just as Mountain Region rival Northern Arizona did last year in handily beating the Cougars, but Eyestone has been coaching long enough and successfully enough to know that the season is not defined by one race.
Ranked teams abounded here in a field somewhat smaller than usual with Pre-Nats looming in 3 weeks. Nonetheless, a number of teams served notice and far outran their rankings. No. 20 Wake Forest was 3rd with 150, No. 6 North Carolina 4th with 196, No. 27 Washington 5th with 246 and no. 26 Michigan 6th with 262.
In short, too many good teams are lurking and biding their time for the next two months. Absent from this 3-weeks-earlier-than-usual Nutty were top-rated defending champ Oklahoma State, No. 3 Arkansas, No. 4 NAU and four other top 10 units as well seven more ranked teams plus host Wisconsin, which will race in full force in mid-October. The Pre-Nationals field on October 19 (on this same Zimmer Championships Course layout) will not only be much larger but likely will further separate contenders and pretenders.
Certainly no pretender is the resilient Wolfe, who in his fall debut has seemingly picked up where he left off in Eugene with his NCAA 5000 win and his Trials 3rd. Wolfe finished here in 23:04.0. It’s the best time ever recorded over the 8K route that was revised in ’18. He’ll have his hands full here in November with, among a bunch of others, defending NCAA champ Graham Blanks of Harvard, who ended up taking Wolfe’s spot on the Olympic team by dint of having it the tough Paris Q-standard.
“I think more than anything, it was a good hard hit that I needed,” Wolfe said. “It definitely kicked my butt. So it was a good test. There wasn’t really a strategy but it was just kind of hang…
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