TSR's 2022 Preseason D3 XC Top 10 Rankings (Men): #6 SUNY Geneseo Knights

Edits and additional commentary by Garrett Zatlin

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The SUNY Geneseo men showed tons of promise throughout last fall, although nothing that we saw from them surprised us. The Knights have been a top-10 team in the country for the last few years and only on rare occasions have they faded from that spot.

Over the next few months, we will likely see more of the same from a team that boasts a ton of underrated names and pair of star low-sticks, each of whom are expected to be better this fall than they were in 2022.

And if that happens, then our TSR #6 ranking of this team might be end up being an underwhelming one.

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The Knights admittedly cruised through most of their 2021 cross country schedule, not losing to any D3 competition prior to the national meet. And while they didn’t face much competition at the conference or regional level, they did find themselves fending off some of the best distance programs in the country.

At the Mike Woods Invite, a meet hosted by SUNY Geneseo, the Knights had the task of battling top-tier teams such as Middlebury, Otterbein and a solid Case Western team. But when the results were tallied, it was clear that the men from Geneseo, New York were the more dominant squad.

Ezra Ruggles was fantastic on his home course, earning the overall win while teammate Nick Andrews would build on his already great success, placing 4th overall. With Riley Grossman placing 6th, the Knights were simply unmatched in terms of firepower.

And when it came to their depth, the combination of Charles Wilson and Ben Timmons would close out the scoring in 10th and 11th place, respectively. Simply put, the low-stick scorers that we saw from Middlebury and Otterbein would have only been middle lineup scorers for SUNY Geneseo.

After that comfortable win, the Knights advanced to the Rowan Inter-Regional Border Battle where they would face the likes of Lynchburg, Johns Hopkins, Haverford, Saint Olaf and numerous others.

And yet, despite the competition, the Knights were simply the most complete and well-rounded group through five runners.

The combination of Andrews (2nd) and Ruggles (3rd), paired with Riley Grossman (6th), gave this team a level of firepower similar to what we saw at Mike Woods. The Lynchburg men, however, had done a very good job of matching (most of) the Knights low-stick scoring.

But when it came to the backend, SUNY Geneseo was simply the better team. Charles Wilson secured yet another huge finish in 11th place while Matthew Blauvelt placed 17th overall.

With every other team having backend scoring challenges or limited firepower, the Knights ultimately came away with yet another win. They scored just 39 points, powering past the runner-up Lynchburg Hornets who settled with 90 points.

After cruising through their conference and regional meets, the Knights ventured to the national meet where we would get a greater gauge of just how good this team was against competition that held similar levels of depth and firepower.

Once there, the SUNY Geneseo men ran well, but it did feel like they had left a handful of points on the table.

The Knights had a very solid front-three yet again, featuring Nick Andrews and Ezra Ruggles who were both on the cusp of All-American honors. Andrews finished 39th overall while Ruggles just missed out on the same honor in 43rd place. Just behind those two was senior Bradley Farnham, who, in his final race in a SUNY Geneseo singlet, had the best race of his career to finish 47th overall.

However, the Knights had some uncharacteristic difficulties with their depth on the national stage. Their other four runners all finished outside of the top-130. That, in turn, would force this men's team to settle for an 8th place finish, a fairly underwhelming result compared to the top-five expectations that were set for them.

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This year’s SUNY Geneseo team returns four of their top-seven men from last year's national meet lineup. And those who are departing? Well, almost all of them were high-impact names last fall. Graduating are Bradley Farnham, Riley Grossman and Matthew Blauvelt.

Those are all significant losses as each runner was no stranger to a scoring role throughout last fall. Farnham was a top-50 runner on the national stage, Grossman earned back-to-back 6th place finishes in national-caliber fields and Blauvelt was often closing out the team scoring in a handful of meets.

Pretending like this team doesn't have some potential scoring challenges ahead of them would be a bit naive. The bulk of their middle-lineup and backend scoring from the 2021 cross country season is essentially gone. While the Knights did have phenomenal low-sticks, it was the rest of this lineup that made this team so highly regarded.

And yet, regardless of the departures, the Knights will still have an incredibly strong team in 2022, led by one of the best scoring duos that D3 has to offer.

Andrews and Ruggles are both coming off of outstanding seasons on the track. Their scoring improvements this fall will be minimal during the regular season, but there is a good chance that each of these men are FAR better on the national stage than they were last fall.

You can’t really say enough about either of those guys, but to make a long story short, they were one of the most impressive scoring duos in the nation this past spring.

Andrews and Ruggles are listed at TSR #14 and TSR #19, respectively, in our preseason individual rankings, so it is pretty clear that they have the potential to take big jumps into the top-15 range if everything goes perfectly.

It’s obvious that there are no issues with Geneseo’s top-end talent.

But their depth? Well, it's actually pretty solid as well.

Charles Wilson and Andrew Timmons, who were the fourth and fifth runners for the Knights at last year's national meet, showed tons of promise last fall and throughout the rest of the year.

Wilson, for example, was an outstanding fourth scorer in this lineup throughout the 2021 cross country regular season. Finishing 10th at the Mike Woods Invite and 11th at the Rowan Inter-Regional Border Battle are two underrated results which make us feel very confident about his scoring prowess this fall.

Up until the national meet, he was a very reliable name in the latter-half of this lineup. Wilson has also run 14:46 for 5000 meters on the track, offering further encouragement about his talent coming into this season.

Timmons, meanwhile, has run an eye-catching mark of 8:27 for the 3000 meters on the indoor oval. Outside of the Rowan Inter-Regional Border Battle, this is a guy who was closely mirroring the results that we saw from Wilson throughout last fall. His value as a scorer is far greater than some people may realize.

However, if SUNY Geneseo wants to finish higher at this year's national meet than they did last fall, then it will be massively important for these two men to take strides forward this fall and use their big meet experience to execute clutch performances when it matters the most.

That's not a guarantee to happen, but in almost every meet leading up to the 2021 national meet, these two men proved that they could be closer to top-100 finishers rather than outside of the top-130.

Outside of their 2021 national meet roster, three of the most notable returners for the Knights this fall will likely be William Hall, Alex Hilyard and Ryan Mitchell.

The Knights will need a strong fifth scorer to narrow the gap behind Wilson and Timmons in order to remain competitive on the national stage.

Obviously, at a program like SUNY Geneseo, you could always see an unexpected name breakthrough and establish themselves as a scoring threat. But for now, it looks like the backend contributions of this 2022 team will come from one of those three names. They will all be vaulted into more important varsity roles than they have seen in the past.

Hillyard earned a 9th place finish at the SUNYAC XC Championships last fall in his first collegiate cross country season. He was also the sixth Knight to cross the line in that race, but did not go on to compete at regionals or nationals.

During the track season, he recorded times of 14:59 (5k) and 31:37 (10k), marks that certainly suggest that greater improvement on the grass is on the way.

Hall, meanwhile, didn’t necessarily have any eye-catching cross country finishes last year, but his breakthrough came on the track this past spring. Times of 14:53 (5000) and 31:23 (10k), in similar fashion to Hillyard, suggest that he has a promising future ahead of him.

As for Mitchell, he is another guy who didn’t do anything crazy on the cross country course last year, but still managed to put down a highly impressive 9:13 steeplechase mark in the spring.

Between this backend trio, that steeple mark is likely the most impressive of the group. If Mitchell is able to translate that mark to the grass, then the Knights may have found their fifth scorer.

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SUNY Geneseo may lose a lot of scoring production from last fall, but they still return a highly formidable and dangerous team in 2022. Their firepower is elite, their middle-lineup scorers are very underrated and there are clearly enough backend options to fill-out the rest of this varsity seven.

It's hard to know if we will see the same level of depth from the Knights later this year that we saw from them last fall. However, if you're looking strictly at their performances from the NCAA XC Championships, then there is a very good argument that almost all of SUNY Geneseo's returners from that race could be significantly better on that stage come November.

And if that happens, then we might have robbed the SUNY Geneseo men from a podium-equivalent preseason ranking.