2020 Freshman Class Rankings Rubric

If you've been a TSR reader since the very beginning, then you know that one of our marquee pieces of content is our distance recruit class rankings. What we do is look at the incoming distance recruits around the NCAA (800m and up) and attempt to evaluate which programs brought in the best young distance talents.

Typically, these rankings take place in the summer. However, because the pandemic messed up our content schedule this year, we were ultimately forced to delay those recruit rankings (until now).

So, before we release our recruit rankings, we thought it would be a good idea to give you all an idea of how we constructed these rankings, how we collected the data and when you can expect to see our content.

Let's jump right in...

The Stride Report is aiming to release our D1 recruit class rankings (top-10) starting tomorrow. The aim for our D2 recruiting classes (top-five) and our D3 recruiting classes (top-five) is to publish those during the first week of January.

With things relatively quiet around the NCAA, we thought now would be a good time to post these rankings.

For D1, we'll be releasing our rankings a bit differently this year. Instead of one men's recruiting class and one women's recruiting class each day, we'll be grouping some of our rankings together.

For example, tomorrow we'll be publishing recruiting classes 10-9-8 for the men and 10-9-8 for the women. The next day, we'll be publishing 7-6-5 for the men and 7-6-5 for the women. The day after that, we'll be publishing 4-3-2 for the men and 4-3-2 for the women. Finally, on the last day, the top-ranked recruiting classes on both the men's and women's sides will get their own articles.

We're not quite sure how we'll be releasing our D2 rankings yet, but our D3 rankings will likely be one big article for the men (top-five) and one big article for the women (top-five).

If that didn't make any sense, then you'll see what I mean when we start posting.

Admittedly, because we're grouping together portions of our rankings, our write-ups won't be quite as in-depth as they have been in the past for these recruit rankings. Preparing for the upcoming seasons of competition and the holidays has left us with limited time, but I like to think that we still have some great analysis with extensive detail.

We understand that the timing of these rankings is a bit odd, especially since we already had cross country action take place this past fall. However, it's important to note that we are ranking current freshmen.

This means that current high school seniors are not being considered for these rankings.

We're looking at athletes who graduated from high school in 2020. We are not looking at the Class of 2021. That group is still in high school, so we'll rank them next year.

Redshirt freshmen are not included in these rankings. Transfers from other universities are also not included in these rankings.

Mission trips, however, were a very challenging aspect to manage when it came to our rankings. Ultimately, we decided that if you were a high school senior who graduated in 2020 and committed to run for a certain university, then you'll be factored into these rankings even if you went on a mission trip (assuming we were able to find your commitment).

Our TSR crew has spent the past three weeks scouring the internet for any and all recruits we could find. We looked at essentially every program that has been even remotely competitive in the distance events over the past few years.

The good news is that unlike past years, these rosters were updated and actually had their new recruits listed. We didn't have to go to a ton of different places to find our data this year.

However, actually ranking these recruiting classes was arguably the hardest part of all.

Let me just throw out this disclaimer while I'm here. There are going to be A LOT of strong and impressive recruiting classes that didn't make it into our rankings. There were a solid six to nine D1 programs that had a realistic argument for a top-10 ranking that didn't get a spot.

When it comes to rankings, we looked a variety of things such as...

The first three criteria that we listed hold the most weight, but we looked at a few other things when making these rankings. Not only that, but every division had at least three TSR contributors voting on these recruiting classes.

In simpler terms, we did exhaustive research and spent hours trying to come up with the right rankings. People will likely disagree, but that's half the fun of it.

There are a handful of NCAA programs that we looked at who are bringing in international athletes. In a few instances, those athletes may be older than 18 or 19 years old. However, they are listed on their respective rosters as freshmen.

Unless we've been told otherwise, we have based our rankings off of what these rosters say. Is it possible that there are one or two athletes who we included who aren't actually considered true freshmen? Maybe, but otherwise we feel like these rankings should be a fairly accurate representation of which programs brought in the best young distance talents.