What if D3 MIT dueled D1 Florida in track and field?
The Florida Gators are NCAA Champions again in track and field. At this point, it’s a bigger deal when they don’t win it all, because they’ve won six outdoor championships in the past eleven years. We have Grant Holloway, Joseph Fahnbulleh, and now Emmanuel Bamidele to thank for all that. The Florida Gators are very good but they keep on winning because they don’t need to have the best team, top to bottom in the NCAA. In fact, they weren’t even ranked in the top 5 teams in their region of the NCAA. In actuality there are 9 regions around the country. Yet Florida is the Division 1 national champion for outdoor track and field. So that makes them the best men’s track team in the country. But what would happen if they actually competed in a dual meet, with the Division 3 National champions? The truth is something that is so shocking, that once you see it, you’ll never be able to forget it.
MIT is the D3 NCAA Track and Field Champion
Who are the D3 champions? It’s actually the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, better known as MIT. A school that people recognize for being the top engineering school in all of America, so much so that their sporting mascot is the “Engineers”. Not only are they Division 3, which means they give out no athletic scholarship, at all. But they are a private college in the D3 New England conference. It is a school with less than 5000 students and a tuition of nearly 60 thousand dollars! Their opponent the Florida Gators are a public college in the SEC conference, the most well-funded sports league disguised as college athletics. They have almost 35,000 students on campus. These two schools are 1200 miles away, and couldn’t be any more different.
What is a dual meet?
Dual meets are common at the high school level, but college teams do them too every year. USC vs UCLA, Army vs. Navy, and even Lafayette vs. Lehigh, are dual meets that happen every single year on the track and field calendar. In those meets, each team faces off in every track event with only their top 3 athletes entered. The meet gets scored from there, until we have a winner. So for this virtual meet, the results will be calculated by taking the best wind legal performances for each athlete to qualify as their results for the meet. The points will be scored the same way Lafayette and Lehigh did it in D1. Each team gets a max of 3 athletes to compete per event, with only the top 2 on each team scoring. The point scores go 5, 3, 2, 1. So if you sweep an event, it’s 8 points for your team, and 3 for the opponents. There are 20 events at the national meet, not including the decathlon, so both these champions will dual it out in each of them!
Sprints and distance events
Starting off in the sprinting events, the Gators beat up on the Engineers, which is to be expected. They swept the 100, 200, and 400 to go up 24 to 9 to start the meet. Honestly, their two best sprinters, wouldn’t even have to run, because Florida is that deep in the sprints. But Ryan Wilson would get MIT on the board going second in the 800 meter running 1:47.93 behind Florida’s Sam Austin in 1:47 flat. He would later win the 1500 outright in 3:40.06. That would close the gap to a score of 36, 19 Florida leading.
But this is where things get interesting. MIT is almost as good at the distance events, as Florida is in the sprints. That is why they are the reigning D3 cross country champions. So they would sweep the long distance events in the 5000 and the 10000 meter run. Florida barely runs those events, with only 1 man in the 10K. So with 7 events scored Florida leads 41 to 35.
Hurdles and relays
Florida would win the 110 hurdles, but it would be close,because their best runner went 14.18 in the 110s, and MIT had 3 hurdlers who all ran between 14.22 and 14.26! But it doesn’t matter because the lead would stretch to 48, 39 Gators. However, both teams only had 1 runner in the 400 hurdles, and you can guess that the Gators would win that event too. But Florida didn’t have even 1 runner in the 3K steeplechase, all season long. Which is a shame because MIT takes distance seriously. They would of won the event either way, but with Florida failing to score at all, it would now be 53 to 50, with the Gators on top of the Engineers. For the record the meet is already half over!
Florida would later sweep the relays in the 4x1 and 4x4, so that’s 10 points for them and only 6 for MIT. But Florida doesn’t pole vault, at all, and they only have 1 high jumper, who would technically win the event. Which means MIT would now take the lead 69 to 68 with only 6 events remaining! By this point the Engineers have calculated their chances at an upset, because the meet was supposed to be over already.
Jumps and Throws
But the Florida Gators can jump with anyone in the nation. They’d sweep the Long Jump and the Triple Jump. But MIT’s Kenneth Wei would make it interesting, by jumping 25 feet in a losing effort. Florida would also sweep the Shot Put to give them a commanding lead of 92 to 78. But the Engineers still aren’t done, winning the Discus outright behind Sam Engebretson. Florida doesn’t even throw the Hammer at all! So with 1 event to go the score is 97 to 92 Florida Gators. That’s the javelin, and there isn’t much MIT can do to stop it, so they would lose the meet by 11 points 105 to 94.
The Bottom Line
If you had Florida to win the meet, you would be right, but nobody saw MIT keeping the meet that close. Remember, this is the Division 1 national championship team, from the SEC conference! It’s basically professional track and field at that level. But a non-scholarship Division 3 school, the MIT Engineers of all colleges, could keep things very interesting from start to finish! D1 track is perhaps the most competitive level in the NCAA. But do not sleep on D3 schools, not even a little bit. If MIT went up against even an average level D1 team, it is safe to say all the smart money is on the team of Engineers who can run track with the best of them. That is even without any athletics scholarships.
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