The cross country program is already in midseason through the regular season after only completing three meets.

They will have three more meets to run before the Ohio Valley Conference Championships.

But the previous meets are not as important as the meets they will be competing in the next few weeks.

This is the time of the cross country season when teams begin to really focus on finalizing the Panthers top seven runners and preparing for conference.

Normally by midseason of sports, teams are set in place and you can have a pretty good idea of where one team is in reference to the other people in that conference. But not necessarily who will win or lose the conference just how they compare to each other.

So for example, this weekend the men’s cross country beat Southeast Missouri by 34 points in the Panther Open, one might assume by just looking at the score, that Eastern has a stronger men’s team than SEMO.

This assumption is not accurate because both Eastern and SEMO are sitting out a few of their top guys. How each team did this weekend doesn’t realistically show where they stand in the conference.

Now this is hypothetical, but for example, let’s say SEMO had to race against another conference team such as Eastern Kentucky and SEMO beat EKU, which I doubt SEMO would win because EKU had four of the top six runners in the championship last year and at least three of those top runners can compete again this year.

But if SEMO did beat EKU, one might just assume that since Eastern beat SEMO and SEMO beat EKU, that Eastern will beat EKU.

Obviously, unexpected things happen and these conditional statements in sports don’t always work out like they do in math, but we still use them to pick favorites in games and to try and predict the outcome of a certain event.

In cross country you can’t necessarily look at the previous regular season meets to determine how tough a team is going to be at conference, because a lot of teams don’t have their entire championship team running until the last few meets of the season.

Head coach Geoff Masanet said that probably by next weekend teams will start to bring back the people they’ve had sitting out and things will start to be clearer.

Since a lot of the coaches pay attention to who the other teams are holding back and can sort of anticipate where those people will finish the coaches are not as clueless as to which teams are higher in the conference as an average person is.

“You sort of have an idea based on how a team did at conference last year, and who is not racing in the early meets,” Masanet said. “But after the next couple weekends it is going to be a lot more obvious what teams will be up there and which ones won’t.”