TSR's 2022 D3 XC Top 10 Team Rankings (Men): Update #5

TSR Collaboration
Nov 25, 2022
10 min read

Written by Kevin Fischer, Hannah Thorn, Brett Haffner & John Cusick

Additional edits and commentary by Garrett Zatlin

NOTE: These rankings are based on how a team fared throughout the entirety of a season, not just how they ran at the NCAA XC Championships or at a singular meet. You will notice that these rankings may mirror the national meet results, but not precisely. That is intentional. These rankings are intended to be an aggregate, not a recency list.

KEY

(Unranked):

Was not ranked in our last update.

(#/#):

First number indicates how much the team has moved in the rankings.

The second number indicates where the team was ranked in our last update.

10. UW-Whitewater Warhawks (-1 / 9)

The men of UW-Whitewater were primed to have a successful national meet after their win at the North Regional XC Championships.

Christian Patzka finished runner-up to Alex Phillip at the national meet and things could not have started any better for the Warhawks. Unfortunately, Gunner Schlender didn't capitalize on the same momentum as his teammate as he finished 30th overall.

With their third, fourth and fifth runners tallying 65, 121 and 152 points, there was simply too much excessive scoring for the Warhawks to overcome and they eventually settled for a 10th place finish overall.

Now, before we get too far ahead of ourselves, this result doesn't come as too much of a surprise given the youth of this team. Only one athlete, Justin Krause, is classified as an upperclassman. The Warhawks relied on a freshman and five sophomores to lead this team throughout this fall.

In most cases, youth comes with inconsistency, which was displayed throughout the 2022 season. And sure enough, that reared its head again at the NCAA XC Championships last weekend.

Regardless, this season should still be considered successful despite the five-spot drop from last year's national meet results.

The Warhawks rebuilt their lineup and remained as a nationally competitive team after losing key runners from the 2021 season. With another year of training and experience, the UW-Whitewater men will be a strong squad that should return to the national meet in 2023 with eyes on a top-five team result.

9. UW-La Crosse Eagles (-2 / 7)

The men from UW-La Crosse are another team that suffered from some inexperience at the backend of their lineup.

Led by Ethan Gregg and Isaac Wegner, the Eagles had the ability to make up for some scoring issues on the backend with potent firepower. That scoring duo did their job, finishing 4th and 11th, respectively, at the national meet.

Grant Matthai (70th) and Corey Fairchild (93rd) held their own and offered some level of stability at the middle portion of this lineup. But with their fifth runner placing 171st overall, that ultimately caused the Eagles to tumble to 8th place at the national meet.

The Matthai brothers are freshmen and Fairchild is only a sophomore, meaning that they should only get better with another year of experience under their belt. Seeing how they perform during the upcoming track seasons will give us a better outlook on their future, but the Eagles should still be encouraged by an 8th place team finish at NCAA XC Championships.

UW-La Crosse proved to be a better team than last year by two spots (at the national meet) and they walked with strong results throughout this season. That included a 3rd place team finish at the D3 National Preview as well as a win at the WIAC XC Championships and a 2nd place finish at the North Regional XC Championships.

All things considered, everything was trending in the right direction for this team.

Sure, their season may not have ended as well as we thought it could have, but given the youth at the backend of this lineup and the potency of both Gregg and Wegner going into their senior seasons, the focus might be on next year anyways.

And yes, the Eagles did beat RPI at the national meet by three points, but considering the overall seasonal resume that the Engineers built, we felt like the men from the east coast deserved the (slight) nod.

This will probably be a controversial ranking in the eyes of a few, but we further detail our thoughts below...

8. RPI Engineers (-2 / 6)

RPI ended their season with a 9th place finish at this year's NCAA XC Championships.

That's five spots better than where they finished at the 2021 national meet, capping off a successful season for the Engineers.

Matthew Lecky and Cory Kennedy continued their strong running this season as they finished 11th and 20th, respectively, on Saturday. This was the second time that Lecky was inside the top-40 of the national meet in his career and it's the first All-American honor for Kennedy who improved 196 spots from his 2021 campaign.

After those two, things didn't quite hold together as well as they had during the regular season. Mitchell Dailey finished 83rd, Connor Wooding finished 109th and Jason Gibbons was 136th. In reality, those are not bad finishes for those three scorers, but there certainly needed to be greater value in the middle portion of this lineup.

Patrick Smyth, the team's typical third or fourth scorer, simply had an "off" day and finished 237th, emerging as the final athlete across the line for RPI. If he had typically scored where we expected him to, then we might be talking about RPI moving up in our rankings from their previous spot at TSR #6.

Instead, we see them drop to TSR #8 in our final update.

Given their improvement from last year and their strong showings this season -- 1st at the Rowan Interregional Border Battle, 1st at the Liberty League XC Championships and 2nd at Mideast Regional XC Championships -- we ultimately decided to give the Engineers the edge over UW-La Crosse despite falling three points behind the Eagles on Saturday.

A large part of that is because this team TROUNCED the Williams men at the Siena Invitational and the Ephs turned out to be very competitive. They also comfortably took down both John Carroll (a podium team) and Johns Hopkins at Paul Short.

And with a win over yet another podium team, SUNY Geneseo, at Rowan, the overall seasonal resume of RPI was enough to keep them at TSR #8 despite finishing 9th last Saturday.

7. Williams Ephs (-3 / 4)

The Williams men are one of the toughest teams to rank in Division Three. In our final rankings, we have them dropping three spots to TSR #7

The Ephs won the Mideast Regional XC Championships, they won the NESCAC XC Championships and were 2nd to MIT at the Connecticut College Invite.

However, that is not the team that we saw at the NCAA XC Championships last weekend...or at the Siena Invitational to start the season.

Last weekend, Elias Lindgren finished 24th overall and turned out to be the second scorer for his team. Instead, it was John Lucey who finished as the top scorer for the Ephs, earning an 18th place finish overall.

Fellow teammates Nikhil DeNatale (50th), Grahm Tuohy-Gaydos (63rd) and Simon Kissam (87th) closed out the scoring with decent, but admittedly underwhelming, results. In the end, they finished 6th overall at the national meet.

There is nothing else to say except that this was a disappointing end to the season for the Williams men. Their lineup was set up for success at the national meet, but they didn't deliver on their full potential.

Whether it was the weather, they peaked too early, or just an "off" day, the Ephs have made it admittedly difficult to rank them much higher than TSR #7. Sure, they rallied in the postseason, but their rough start at the Siena Invitational and lack of a major win over a top-tier contender forces us to place them one spot back of their national meet finish.

6. SUNY Geneseo Knights (Unranked)

How about SUNY Geneseo?!

It was admittedly tough to get a read on the Knights this season. They easily won the SUNYAC XC Championships and the Niagara Regional XC Championships. They also ran very well at the Rowan Interregional Border Battle, finishing 2nd as a team behind RPI.

But at that Rowan Interregional meet, they were 38 points behind RPI and just two points ahead of Lynchburg.

And if you go further back than just the Rowan Interregional, you'll see that the Knights lost to Case Western at their home meet and were the fourth Division Three team in the results at the MSU Spartan Invitational.

We'll be honest, the Knights weren't really on our radar coming into the national meet. Did they have strong results leading up to this? Sure. But did those results scream that they were a top-10 team? No, not particularly.

That narrative has obviously changed after their 3rd place finish at the NCAA XC Championships. Nick Andrews has proven that he's one of the best low-sticks in the country with his 6th place finish. Meanwhile, Ezra Ruggles (33rd) and Alex Hillyard (39th) finishing as All-Americans dramatically changed the scoring potency of this team.

Add in Dillon McClary in 48th as well as William Hall in 78th, and you've got a recipe for major success (i.e. a podium finish) at the national meet.

This was the biggest surprise result in Division Three this year, at least on the men's side. And with six of those seven athletes expected to return next year, things might only get better.

5. North Central Cardinals (-1 / 4)

We didn’t really have the room in our national meet reactions article to talk about North Central, but last Saturday was an "off" day for the Cardinals as they finished a disappointing 7th place overall on the national stage.

There had been a lot of expectations about the Cardinals’ top scoring trio of Connor Riss, Braden Nicholson and Max Svienty going into last weekend, but all three of them underperformed to varying degrees.

The efforts of their fourth scorer from the Midwest Regional XC Championships, Andrew Guimond, led this team on the national stage as he placed 29th overall -- a great performance for someone who has been unheralded for most of this season.

It was truthfully disappointing to see some of NCC's potent firepower not finish as high as we may have expected, but the main kicker from the Cardinals’ season was their resurgence back onto the national scene as the contender that they should be.

While they lose a bulk of their lineup in 2023, it should be clear how this group has helped revive North Central from the ashes. They may have faltered to 7th on the national stage, but they did enough to maintain a top-five ranking, especially with other teams that finished ahead of them holding varying levels of overall seasonal success.

4. John Carroll Blue Streaks (+6 / 10)

After their remarkable 4th place team finish at last year’s national meet, the expectations that we placed on John Carroll this fall were pretty high.

Truthfully, the Blue Streaks were falling short of our expectations for most of this season, but maybe that should have been expected after losing a few key members of their 2021 contributing lineup.

And yet, despite the losses, they placed 4th at the national meet for the second year in a row.

Alex Phillip’s individual national title was clearly no surprise, bringing the Blue Streaks one singular team point for his efforts.

TSR colleague Hannah Thorn already talked about JCU's second scorer in our national meet reactions article, but Joe Backus’ All-American performance requires repeating. It was simply heroic. Backus will certainly be a strong contender for our “Most Improved Award” in a few weeks' time.

Ryan Champa nearly earning All-American honors in 49th place was huge while Barrett Scheatzle held his own in 67th place. And with Adam Shah finishing 78th, that ultimately seal the deal for the Blue Streaks to replicate another podium finish.

If there’s one thing that we have learned about John Carroll over these last two academic years, it’s that they know how to peak better than most teams. And while their regular season resume may not be super strong, we still opted to rank them at their national meet finish, which is largely the result of other teams' performances rather than the Blue Streaks.

3. Pomona-Pitzer Sagehens (-2 / 1)

We’ve already discussed Pomona-Pitzer’s tough showing at the national meet and the possible reasons for it. But the fact of the matter is that Saturday's result was an aberration for the Sagehens. There is no way that you could convince us that they are "only" the fifth-best team in the country.

Yes, it's true, even on a good day, this team might have fallen short of a highly impressive and determined MIT team. But it should be noted that they beat runner-up Wartburg by 36 points at the Augustana Interregional Invite, so they shouldn't fall too far back in our rankings.

The Sagehens did have two All-Americans in Lucas Florsheim and Derek Fearon who finished a solid 16th and 24th, respectively, last Saturday. However, their other five runners are where the Pomona-Pitzer men ran into problems.

Colin Kirkpatrick was 61st, Jack Rosencrans was 65th and Ian Horsburgh was 68th. Those performances are not bad in the grand scheme of things, but they certainly aren't good enough to win a national title.

Ultimately, the end of the season wasn’t what the Sagehens would have had in mind, but they still passed every test up and to that point. It's really hard to suggest that, when looking at the entire season, they weren't one of the three-best teams in the nation.

2. Wartburg Knights (+2 / 5)

Despite losing a heavy portion of scoring from last year's squad, the Wartburg men managed to exhibit great consistency throughout this season, even with two close losses to North Central at the Augustana Interregional Invite and the Midwest Regional XC Championships.

Their best performance of the year, by far, came at the national meet last Saturday where they finished 2nd overall. Christopher Collett (7th) did what he was supposed to do, but the real key to the Knights' finish was their supporting cast stepping up in a big way.

Jacob Green, who was 28th at the Augustana Interregional Invite and 14th at his regional meet, finished 21st last weekend, securing a huge All-American honor. Meanwhile, Connor Lancial (34th) bounced back from a tough outing at the Midwest regional meet to emerge as the third All-American for Wartburg.

Backend talents Morgan Shirley-Fairbairn and Sam Schmitz also had solid days, finishing inside the top-50 and limiting any excessive scoring that could have diluted the value of their All-American trio. And in the end, that group of five gave the Wartburg men a 2nd place finish.

What’s incredible about this team is that they probably had less talent than last year’s team that finished 9th at the national meet. But this time, they made the most of their trip to the NCAA XC Championships and performed to their full potential when it mattered.

1. MIT Engineers (+1 / 2)

After finishing runner-up at the 2021 national meet, despite having five All-Americans and a score of 112 points (which is a probable team win in most years), MIT was on a mission to win gold all throughout this year.

The Engineers recorded comfortable wins over Williams, North Central and UW-La Crosse in October and dominated their conference and regional meets. And yet, despite all of that, we still had them ranked at TSR #2.

When the national meet came around, five of their seven athletes who lined up were at last year's national meet. And in the end, that added experience is likely what led to them being at the very top of the podium.

MIT used their collective championship experience to their advantage, putting two men in the top-five, five men in the top 40 and seven men in the top-60 on their way to a thoroughly convincing national title.

And for that reason, we find MIT at the very top of our rankings to end the season.