And Your 2009 NCAA DI Champion Is...

Samuel Chelanga of Liberty easily ran away with the individual champion title Nov. 23 at Terre Haute, Ind.

Chelanga had a finishing time of 28:41.3 for the 10K race. Chelanga beat out second place finisher, David McNeill of Northern Arizona by 25 seconds.

Chelanga's performance was exciting, however, it was Oklahoma State who got all the attention by running to a team championship.

OSU upset the Oregon Ducks, and won by a mere 16 points, which is virtually nothing in a cross country race. Oregon did manage to finish all five scoring runners in front of Oklahoma State's fifth guy, but it wasn't enough.

This year's race was surprisingly televised live on the cable channel Versus. Some funny things happened during the coverage. One of the telecast guys talked about how many of the runners in the race have logged "thousands of miles" during the fall season to prepare for this race. This is embellishing at its finest. Most elite teams will run at the most 100, maybe 120 miles a week during the season. Most teams, however, run around 80. With the season starting in August, and now ending in November, you don't have to be a math wiz to figure out the mileage doesn't come out to be in the thousands. Throw in embellishing like that along with mispronunciations of school names, such as the cringe-worthy calling Villanova "Villacoma," and we have poor coverage all around.

Not only that, Versus went with the individual angle during the entire coverage. Most of the time, the cameras where set on Chelanga, who was way ahead of everybody. Versus should have forgot about him even though he was going to be the winner and focused on the close pack running of Oklahoma State and Oregon who were in a tight race for who would win the team title. This would have been much more interesting than watching someone run by himself the entire way.

In great comedic irony, right after the race coverage was over, a show about duck hunting came on.