BYU did not bring its 5.2-second scoring pack from Terre Haute to Wisconsin. It brought something more durable: five finishers who stayed on the useful side of a 232-man championship race.
No. 7 BYU scored 146 points Friday to place third at the Nuttycombe Wisconsin Invitational. No. 1 New Mexico won with 59, and No. 6 Colorado took second with 93. The Cougars finished 62 points clear of fourth-place Arkansas and beat 32 other teams at the Thomas Zimmer Championship Course.
Tayvon Kitchen placed fifth in 22:37.3, a BYU record on the course. James Corrigan was 18th, Noah Jenkins 34th, Dalton Mortensen 42nd and Hunter Kitchen 47th. Every BYU scorer crossed before the top 50 closed.
That is the result inside the result. BYU’s second-through-fifth spread widened from 5.2 seconds at the John McNichols Invitational to 26.0 seconds at Nuttycombe. The team still reached the podium because it changed one scorer, kept the replacement in the top 50 and refused to let a crowded race turn one difficult kilometer into a triple-digit score.
BYU’s Nuttycombe result
| Team place | Team | Points | Scoring places |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | No. 1 New Mexico | 59 | 2-7-8-20-22 |
| 2 | No. 6 Colorado | 93 | 1-14-21-26-31 |
| 3 | No. 7 BYU | 146 | 5-18-34-42-47 |
| 4 | No. 16 Arkansas | 208 | 15-16-32-65-80 |
| 5 | No. 10 Florida | 221 | 6-40-50-59-66 |
| 6 | No. 8 Wake Forest | 222 | 4-39-48-62-69 |
| BYU scorer | Overall place | Time | Team points |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tayvon Kitchen | 5th | 22:37.3 | 5 |
| James Corrigan | 18th | 23:02.2 | 18 |
| Noah Jenkins | 34th | 23:19.0 | 34 |
| Dalton Mortensen | 42nd | 23:23.8 | 42 |
| Hunter Kitchen | 47th | 23:28.2 | 47 |
| Scoring total | 146 |
Jefferson McMullin placed 85th in 23:48.8, and Land Lambert was 91st in 23:53.3. BYU’s official report says 10 of its 13 runners across the championship and B races set personal bests.
The official event record is complete, BYU has published its meet report, and the TFRRS results carry the full team and individual order. This was not a scheduled-time assumption. The result is usable and final.
Kitchen’s fifth place kept BYU out of the chase pack
Colorado freshman Meshack Kipruto won in 22:30.1, only 7.2 seconds ahead of Kitchen. New Mexico’s Pasanjo Kitonga finished second in 22:30.8, followed by Louisville’s Elsingi Kipruto and Wake Forest’s Rocky Hansen.
Kitchen was the only BYU runner in that lead group, and his five points changed the shape of the team race. Without a low single-digit score, BYU’s 34-42-47 finish from its last three counters would have left much more work for Corrigan. Instead, the Cougars could absorb traffic behind their first two men and still separate from the teams fighting for fourth.
BYU’s official report calls 22:37.3 a course record for the program, more than 33 seconds faster than the previous BYU best at Zimmer. Course records do not travel from one venue to another, but this one answers the right question. Kitchen had already finished third at Terre Haute against a strong field. At Nuttycombe, with 35 teams and the country’s top-ranked program present, he stayed within eight seconds of the winner.
That is national-front-runner evidence. It is not a November medal, and it does not erase the 87-point gap to New Mexico. It does mean BYU can enter a championship race expecting its first card to be small.
The pack stretched, but it did not break
The pre-meet watch guide centered on BYU’s second-through-fifth spread. Jenkins, Corrigan, Mortensen and Isaac Hedengren had finished within 5.2 seconds of one another at John McNichols.
Friday’s scoring order changed. Hedengren was not in BYU’s seven-man championship lineup, and Hunter Kitchen moved from the seventh BYU finisher at Terre Haute to the fifth scorer at Nuttycombe. That matters more than preserving the old order. BYU needed a replacement counter, and Hunter supplied 47 points instead of leaving an empty space behind Mortensen.
Corrigan finished 26.8 seconds ahead of Hunter, so this was not the same compact block. Yet the five names occupied a useful range. BYU’s 47th-place fifth man crossed ahead of Arkansas’ fourth and fifth scorers, Florida’s third through fifth, and Wake Forest’s third through fifth.
That explains the 62-point margin over Arkansas. Arkansas placed two runners ahead of Corrigan and a third two spots ahead of Jenkins, but its fourth scorer was 65th and its fifth was 80th. BYU had all five home by 47th.
The Cougars did not win the middle of the race the way New Mexico did. They did make every scorer expensive to pass.
New Mexico showed exactly where 87 points live
The gap between first and third can sound abstract. The scoring places make it plain.
New Mexico beat BYU by three points at the first-scorer slot, 11 at the second, 26 at the third, 22 at the fourth and 25 at the fifth. Those five differences add to 87, the exact margin between 59 and 146.
BYU was close enough to New Mexico at the front. The race changed behind Corrigan. New Mexico put its third scorer eighth overall while BYU’s third was 34th. The Lobos then closed with 20th and 22nd; BYU closed with 42nd and 47th.
This is why a third-place finish can be both excellent and incomplete. BYU beat a field loaded with ranked teams and finished on the podium. It also saw the standard for winning this race: a star near the lead, two more scorers in the top eight and no counting place worse than 22nd.
Colorado’s 93 points offered a second comparison. The Buffaloes had the individual winner and put all five scorers in the top 31. BYU trailed Colorado by 53 points, with most of the difference again arriving at the third, fourth and fifth positions.
There is no insult in that arithmetic. It gives BYU a clean October assignment. Kitchen and Corrigan supplied podium-level front scoring. The next move has to come from reducing the places between 18th and 34th and pulling the final two counters toward the 20s.
Hunter Kitchen answered the depth question
After John McNichols, BYU’s obvious warning was the 29.9-second gap between Hedengren in 20th and McMullin in 64th. Hunter Kitchen finished beside McMullin in 65th. The Cougars had two backups together, but neither was close to the scoring five.
Nuttycombe changed that picture. Hunter crossed in 23:28.2 and scored 47th. McMullin followed 20.6 seconds later in 85th, with Lambert another 4.5 seconds back.
The insurance gap still exists. If one of BYU’s five scorers had a poor day, the replacement card would have been 85 rather than 47. That would have added 38 points and dropped the Cougars into the 184-point range, still ahead of Arkansas’s published 208 but much closer to the chase.
The useful part is that the identity of BYU’s fifth scorer changed without wrecking the total. Championship lineups need that flexibility. Hunter did not merely fill a uniform slot; he gave BYU a top-50 counting finish in the deepest regular-season field on the schedule.
McMullin and Lambert also remained together, separated by 4.5 seconds. Pulling that pair toward the scorers is the next depth job. BYU now has evidence that one runner can cross the gap. It needs more than one if the goal is to survive a rough 10K at nationals.
The B race gave BYU another compact five
BYU placed second in the men’s B race with 90 points, behind Wake Forest’s 53 and ahead of Iowa State’s 112.
Carter Cutting led the Cougars in 10th overall at 24:06.6. Malachi Schoenherr was 15th in 24:12.6, Kyle Steadman 16th in 24:13.0, Danny Simmons 24th in 24:22.6 and Ethan Peterson 38th in 24:35.7. Because unattached runners do not score, those finishes counted as 9-13-14-21-33.
The B-race five covered 29.1 seconds from Cutting to Peterson. Schoenherr and Steadman were separated by four-tenths. Those numbers do not splice directly into the championship result; the races had different fields and started at different times. They do show that BYU has another group capable of staying connected through an 8K.
Cutting was only 38.4 seconds behind Hunter Kitchen’s championship time, but a stopwatch comparison cannot recreate traffic or race position. His 10th-place finish is better treated as a postseason selection argument than as proof he would have scored 10th in the earlier race.
That is still valuable. Ed Eyestone now has a championship five that put every counter in the top 50, two nearby reserves in the A race and a B-race group that placed second. The choice before the Big 12 meet is no longer whether depth exists. It is which seven runners give BYU the best chance to keep its fifth score below 50.
What third place changes before the Big 12 Championships
BYU’s regular season ended with two wins and a third against the strongest field it has seen. The Cougars beat No. 2 Iowa State, which finished 19th with 514 points, but Colorado was 53 points ahead of BYU. One race does not transfer its points to Stillwater, especially when conference lineups and conditions can change.
It does strip away some guesswork.
Kitchen can score at the front. Corrigan can give BYU a second top-20 card. Jenkins, Mortensen and Hunter Kitchen can all stay inside the top 50 when a 35-team race starts swallowing space. The B group can produce another compact five.
The unresolved piece is the one New Mexico exposed: BYU needs its third runner closer to its second, and its fourth and fifth closer to the top 30, if the Cougars want to beat a team shaped like Colorado rather than simply finish ahead of the larger pack.
The BYU men’s cross-country schedule now points to the Big 12 Championships on Saturday, Oct. 31 at the Greiner Family Course in Stillwater, Oklahoma. The NCAA Mountain Regional follows Nov. 13 in Albuquerque, then the NCAA Championships on Nov. 21 in Terre Haute.
Nuttycombe gave BYU a podium and a receipt. Five top-50 scorers are enough to beat most of the country. The 87 points between BYU and New Mexico show how much work remains before that becomes enough to beat the best team in the race.
Sources and further reading
- BYU Athletics: BYU finishes third at Nuttycombe for BYU’s 146-point finish, seven championship times, course record, personal-best count, scoring summary and next meet.
- Official BYU Athletics event record 25394 for the stable schedule ID, completed status, date, venue and official box-score path.
- TFRRS: complete 2026 Nuttycombe results for the 35-team championship order, all individual places and times, and men’s B-race results.
- New Mexico Athletics: Lobo men repeat as Nuttycombe champions for the winning 59-point scoring line, checkpoint movement and team margin.
- Colorado Athletics: Kipruto leads Colorado with a course record for independent confirmation of the winner’s 22:30.1, Colorado’s 93 points and the leading team order.
- Iowa State Athletics: Cyclones compete among loaded field for an independent complete team table, Iowa State’s championship finish and the B-race standings.
- BYU Sport Nuts: Nuttycombe watch guide, John McNichols recap, men’s cross-country hub and current roster.
