Women ranked #1

I don't think the NCAAs will be easy for the OR women with the losses of Stevens and Rogers, among others, but they still seem to be the favorites. The men are a concern, not because of the current ranking but because they're not returning many points from last year's 3rd place team. One can hope that the talented incoming squads will immediately contribute, but realistically a top 5 finish would have to be considered a worthy accomplishment. We'll know a lot more after the Armory and Kirby meets.

Thanks, Bill. The videos on the Duck track and field page weren't working yesterday, but one of them supposedly is of RJ discussing the NYC meet.

Agreed re Georgia, but I don't think the indoor meet is really built for field event schools. I know that Georgia has added some track athletes this year, so who knows what they'll throw out there.  The loss of Raevyn and Deajah means a lot of Ducks will have to step up replace their points. I took a look at last years results which showed OR with 84 and Georgia with 51 points. The Ducks will return 41 points (I couldn't come up with the exact teams in the DMR and 4x4, so although the Ducks scored 14 points in those events, I did not include them; safe to say that they will score points in both this year and safe to say Georgia won't). Meanwhile, Georgia will only return 31 of their 51 points, the biggest loss being Kendall Williams. If we eliminate the relay results, the Ducks bring back 59% of their points and Georgia returns 61% of their points, so both schools are losing roughly the same percentage of points.

As always, I'll be curious to see what the Ducks do in the DMR. After setting a collegiate record at the Armory last year, the Ducks only finished 3rd at NCAAs, choosing to save some racers for the individual events while Colorado and Stanford stacked their DMR teams. Even then, the Ducks only finished .34 behind Colorado despite running 12 seconds slower than their NCAA record time. I spent some time looking at edited video of last year's DMR and several things stood out: 1) The Ducks were dead last after the first 1200 leg (not sure if Maton or Nadel ran that leg), 2) Rogers did not run, with Feldmeier handling the 800--and yes, she's back and 3) Katie Rainsberger had the lead in the final leg, but faded down the stretch. A presumably stronger, more seasoned Rainsberger might be expected to hold her lead this year, should she run. In sum, at least 1/2 of last year's DMR team is available and I think it's safe to say that the 1200 leg can't be any worse than last year since the Ducks seem to be a deeper middle distance team than last year. I don't know who ran the 400, but that's the least important leg and the Ducks are well-stacked in that event.

Might as well look at the 4x400, too. The Ducks were second to USC last year. Can they duplicate the 8 points in 2018, keeping in mind that they were 1.3 seconds faster than the 3rd place team? While I wasn't able to ascertain the lead off leg, the following legs were run by Stevens, Guster and Rogers meaning at least 3/4s of last year's squad won't be back.

I don't know that it's reasonable to expect 14 points in the relays this year, but I think 10 points aren't out of the question. Barring injuries, illness and DQs, I think the Ducks are a very safe bet to repeat by at least 10 points.

Thanks for the update, Oldduck. Duh, I was looking at the green jersey in the video and the Ducks were wearing black; given that I was there I might have remembered, but I didn't. I'll miss Horsely. She wasn't the fastest Duck out there, but she almost always ran solid relay legs. The goal this year might be to get Burdon points in the mile and I'm not sure she has the Ches-like strength to run a mile heat, a DMR leg and then a mile final within 24 hours.  She is entered in the mile this weekend, but I suppose they might have her run both the DMR and mile or maybe just the DMR with a scratch in the mile the following day.