NCAA track & field championships 2022: Oregon Ducks not expected to contend for team trophies

Texas is favored to win the ladies’s tile, whereas the boys’s title competitors appears to be like like a four-way, pitched battle between Florida, Texas, North Carolina A&T and Georgia when the NCAA Outside Observe & Discipline Championships start a four-day run Wednesday at Hayward Discipline.

In a departure from the norm, the host Oregon Geese don’t determine to be within the hunt for a staff trophy. Trophies go to the highest 4 groups in each genders.

If the Observe & Discipline Information type charts are right, the Geese will end outdoors the highest 10 in each the boys’s and girls’s standings for the primary time since 2007.

The meet will get underway at 12:30 p.m. Wednesday with the decathlon 100 meters. Most males’s occasion will happen on Wednesday and Friday, with the ladies largely competing on Thursday and Saturday.

MORE: NCAA championships schedule, entries, outcomes

FORM CHART: Observe & Discipline Information males’s chart | girls’s chart

Workforce factors are awarded to the highest eight finishers in every occasion on 10-8-6-5-4-3-2-1 foundation.

Observe & Discipline Information forecasts the Texas girls scoring 79 factors, and Florida second with 63. The Geese are means down, among the many also-rans.

On the boys’s chart, Florida has 42 factors, and a two-point edge over Texas. However North Carolina A&T and Georgia are all inside seven factors of the highest. In a collegiate championship meet, that’s a statistical lifeless warmth. Oregon is penciled in for eleventh.

There shall be dwell tv on ESPNU starting at 4:30 p.m. Wednesday and 5:30 p.m. Thursday, on ESPN2 at 6 p.m. Friday, and on ESPN at 2:30 p.m. Saturday. Discipline occasions and the multi occasions shall be dwell streamed on ESPN3.

MORE: Broadcast info

The Geese do have potential high-end scorers.

Olympian Micah Williams, the turbo-charged sophomore from Portland’s Benson Excessive College, is tied for the NCAA’s No. 3 time on file within the 100 meters, at 9.86 seconds.

Italian Olympian Emmanuel Ihemeje is the defending triple bounce champion. He ranks No. 1 on this 12 months’s collegiate record in with a mark of 56 ft, 2¾ inches.

Past that, T&FN has UO people scratching for locations within the prime eight, and simply 23 projected staff factors. It’s much more bleak on the ladies’s aspect, the place T&FN has the Geese scoring 12 factors and ending in a four-way for nineteenth place.

It’s a great distance from 2015, when Oregon swept the boys’s and girls’s staff titles.

As not too long ago as 2017, the Geese accomplished a girls’s triple crown — NCAA titles in cross nation, indoor and outside observe in the identical tutorial 12 months — by scoring 64 factors to assert the outside championship.

The UO males have been second to LSU a 12 months in the past in a meet which Oregon runners Cooper Teare and Cole Hocker went 1-4 within the closing 5,000, and Hocker received the 1,500.

Each left after final season with eligibility remaining. Hocker was a Tokyo Olympics finalist within the 1,500. If each had caught round and stayed wholesome, Oregon could be the combination, and presumably the favourite for the boys’s title.

There was further misfortune when Reed Brown, who has the third-best collegiate time this 12 months within the 1,500, didn’t survive this 12 months’s regional qualifying.

The UO girls additionally had hassle on this 12 months’s regional, the place Polish Olympian Aneta Konieczek didn’t qualify within the steeplechase. Neither did Alessia Zarbo, No. 2 on this 12 months’s collegiate 10,000 record.

Alysah Hickey, fifth in final 12 months NCAA lengthy bounce, didn’t compete in regional qualifying after repeating as Pac-12 champion two weeks earlier.

However the UO girls’s staff appears to have deeper issues. They completed within the prime three on the NCAA meet from 2009-17, profitable the nationwide title twice. They haven’t been within the prime 4 since.

Six feminine observe athletes — 5 with remaining eligibility — instructed The Oregonian/OregonLive final fall they believed the observe staff’s strategy to their weight and physique fats percentages contributed to consuming problems.

This system since has revised its insurance policies pertaining to weight and physique fats proportion.

The Geese have remained sturdy on the convention stage. The UO males have received each convention title since 2007. Oregon swept the boys’s and girls’s staff championships this 12 months.

UO coach Robert Johnson was named 2022 Pac-12 males’s and girls’s outside coach of the 12 months.

— Ken Goe for The Oregonian/OregonLive

KenGoe1020@gmail.com | Twitter: @KenGoe