Where each runner finishes at Lane, averaged over every simulated season. They race the same field the teams do, individual qualifiers included.
Chute plays the rest of the season out, from here to the finish at Lane, and then does it again. Thousands of times. Every league meet, every selection decision, every state race. The numbers on the board are simply how often each thing happened.
Every result comes from athletic.net, where Oregon's coaches and meet directors post them.
Line every runner up at their season best and you learn who is fastest on paper. You do not learn how likely anything is, and paper does not run in November.
Getting there is a path, not a time. Every league runs its own championship and the top two go straight through. A committee then picks two more from the teams that finished third or fourth. That is the whole field.
OSAA says its committee looks at head-to-head results, with later races counting more. So does Chute. When two of those teams met this season, that result decides which goes first. When they never met, their times on district day decide it.
Nobody races the same twice. Some days the legs are there and some days they are not. Chute treats that as the main event, because on race day it usually is.
Two things about those days matter more than people expect. The first is that teammates tend to have them together. The same bus, the same week of training, the same course that either suits a squad or does not. The second is the shape of the days themselves.
One perfect afternoon in September tells you less than a season of racing does. Where a runner has more than one result, Chute reads the whole season instead of only its best line.
Anyone can publish numbers. The question is whether they hold up, so we checked.
We rebuilt four past seasons exactly as they stood six weeks before their own state meet, with nothing after that date, then played each season forward and compared it with what really happened at Lane in November.
Sorting teams is the easy part. Being right about how sure to be is the hard part, and that is what we checked. The Track record page has the results, good and bad, next to a plain ranking of season bests, which is what most people look at.
One limitation, stated plainly. Those checks were run on 6A, which is where the history is. Every classification runs on the same engine and the same data, and every qualifying rule comes straight from OSAA: how many teams a league sends, how many at-large places exist, and the fact that only four runners score for 3A and 2A/1A girls. But 2026 is the first year of four-runner scoring, and last season the small-school girls raced as one combined division, so there is no matching history to test those two boards against yet. Treat 6A's numbers as evidence about the method rather than as a measured accuracy for every board.
Drop five seconds off a runner and the board moves. The trick is making sure it moved because of the five seconds and not because the dice rolled differently, so every comparison is run against identical races. What you see is the improvement, with the luck held still.
Courses, only partly. Every race is rated by how the runners in it ran against their own form, so a slow day on a hilly course counts for more than the same time on a fast one. It cannot tell a hard course from bad weather on the same afternoon, and a race nobody raced twice around cannot be rated at all.
The future, in detail. We do not know who gets injured, who has a breakthrough, or who joins the squad in October. We do know roughly how much that matters, because we measured it on four past seasons, so the further away Lane is, the more room the board gives every runner. That is room for surprises, not a guess at what they will be. Early-season numbers are rough, and they firm up on their own as November gets closer.
The committee. At-large selection uses this season's head-to-head results and district-day times. The real committee also weighs how strong each league was at last year's state meet, and it talks before it votes. Neither is in here.
We would rather say all of this up front than have you find it later.
Every number on this page comes straight out of the test. None of it is typed in by hand.
What the board said on the day it said it, before any of those races were run. Each snapshot is committed and pushed the same morning, so the dates are public and we cannot go back and change them.
!A rating doesn't know why a race was fast or slow. Weather, hills, altitude, the competition and a short or long course all look the same to it. It only sees how the runners in the race did against their own usual form.
Take time off one or more of the seven and see what it does to the league and state odds. Both worlds run against the same simulated races, so the difference is the improvement, not luck.