Once you’ve recovered from the shock of seeing unfathomable cutoff times for this year’s event, you can throw time out the window entirely and focus on one of the greatest championship meets in track and field: the NCAA Indoor Championships.

The format of indoor NCAAs makes for one of the most entertaining, highly watchable athletic experiences a fan could dream up. It’s a tight, two-day meet where virtually every final contains team titles implications, and the outright winner is often determined by milliseconds in the final event of the meet. Even after the compression of the field into a handful of D1 super-conferences, NCAAs still offers the best chance for matchups that have been percolating all season on different coasts and in different meets to finally come to a head. And for nerds who love a “I was there first” brag, it’s a chance to peek at the Olympic stars of tomorrow as they enter their athletic prime—just ask Grant Holloway, Cole Hocker, Julian Alfred, or any of the twelve other Paris gold medalists who came up through the NCAA system.

Here’s some bookmarks for your weekend: Women’s Entries / Men’s Entries / Schedule / Live Results. The meet will be broadcast live on ESPN+ (subscription required), and the CITIUS MAG team will have boots on the ground in Virginia Beach this Friday and Saturday with updates and interviews.

Most years, many events at NCAAs are defined by the presence of a heavy favorite—your Parker Valbys, Christopher Morales-Williamses, Nico Youngs, or Maia Ramsdens. But this year, it feels a little different: so many races, especially in the distance events, appear genuinely wide open.

So where to begin? The two fastest male milers in NCAA history have scratched the event to contest the 3000m-DMR double instead, so maybe the 3k is a good place to start. Neither UNC’s Ethan Strand nor Virginia’s Gary Martin have won an NCAA title, but they’ve both spent much of the winter taking cracks at various middle-distance records. Strand got the better of Martin in the 5000m at ACCs, beating his rival by four seconds and notching a meet-record 13:26.60, but Martin came back the next day with a meet record of his own in the 3000m of 7:36.69 (Strand didn’t contest the double). 

But even with two sub-3:50 milers testing their mettle, it’s entirely possible someone else comes out on top. Strand’s training partner and reigning outdoor 5000m champ Parker Wolfe, NCAA XC fourth-place finisher Yaseen Abdalla of Arkansas, and Villanova’s Liam Murphy could all factor into a “surprise” victory—which wouldn’t be totally surprising for close observers. Each member of this quintet is heading into the race with personal bests lower than the previous collegiate record of 7:36.42.

The women’s 3000m has been just as groundbreaking this season, as the minimum qualifying mark is five seconds faster than last year’s and nine of the fourteen fastest women of all time ran their PBs this year. BYU’s Lexy Halladay-Lowry tops the entry list, but the field is also full of historically fast milers with lethal kicks including NCAA record holder Silan Ayyildiz of Oregon, Margot Appleton of Virginia, and Halladay-Lowry’s own teammate Riley Chamberlain. If this one comes down to a kick, the final lap could see serious chaos, but Appleton and Ayyildiz may be a bit tired assuming they make the mile final an hour earlier.

The men’s 5000m begs the timeless question: do you bet on strength or speed? Abdalla and Murphy are two very different runners going head to head in the 25-lapper. Abdalla is a newly minted Paris Olympian and 2:11 marathoner while Murphy is a 1500m Olympic Trials finalist and the poster child for a strong finishing kick. But favorite status may belong instead to another strength-based runner, Habtom Samuel of New Mexico, who no longer needs to worry about finishing behind Graham Blanks (who’s still technically the national leader despite going pro with New Balance in December). If Samuel doesn’t fall 900m from the finish or lose a spike mid-race, we’re optimistic about his chances. But despite his 10,000m title and cross country strength, Samuel has only finished sixth and fourth in NCAA 5000m finals, so he can’t be considered a lock.

While the betting stakes are high in the majority of distance events, odds are a little less malleable in the women’s 5000m. Alabama’s Doris Lemngole is one of three women to dip below the 15:00 mark this year and hasn’t lost to another collegian all season. With NCAA cross country and steeplechase titles already on her trophy shelf, she’s got the resume and knows a thing or two about championship racing across a variety of events. But we wouldn’t count out Florida’s Hilda Olememoi, the third-fastest woman in collegiate history—yet only the second-fastest Gator—or Halladay-Lowry, who’s boosted her national profile this school year with a 14th-place finish at cross nationals and the third-fastest NCAA 3000m on any sized track after going 8:40.60 at UW. We’re also curious to see indoor rookie Paityn Noe of Arkansas, who practically paced herself to a 15:11.27 at the SEC Championships just two weeks ago. It’s scary to think about what that means for her potential in this event in a more saturated race. 

To close out the distance events, we’d be doing our readers a disservice if we forgot to mention the distance medley relay in the one championship where it gets the spotlight it deserves. A mere 0.09 seconds separates the Washington and Virginia men’s squads. The current purple oversized asterisk next to the Huskies’ all-conditions, all-time leading mark might serve as an added chip on UW’s collective shoulder to take the official collegiate record from the Cavaliers in the final hurrah we will see in this event indoors in 2025. And somehow, the DMR on the women’s side has been even better this winter. The UW Husky Classic saw the five fastest times in collegiate history run in the same race… that is until Oregon established the official collegiate record at BU a week later.

A mere six hundredths of a second separates every qualifier in the men’s 60 meter dash, and with the departure of defending champ Terrence Jones last year, there’s no clear heir apparent. Auburn’s dynamic duo of Kanyinsola Ajayi and Israel Okon are tied for the top seed at 6.51, but they both lost to Arkansas’s Jordan Anthony at SECs. Anthony has raced sparingly this year—SECs was actually his first 60m final and only third weekend of racing—so we don’t have a ton of data points, but he did fail to make the final at NCAAs last year so he’s no lock. The favorite might actually be Big Ten champ JC Stevenson, which is crazy because the reigning NCAA outdoor long jump champ has never actually contested an individual track event at NCAAs. Stevenson ran the fastest time in the country in January at Texas Tech, which funnily enough doesn’t make him the top seed as his 6.50 gets bumped back to 6.52 due to the university’s 3200 feet of altitude.

Not every event is closely contested, however, thanks to South Carolina’s Jameesia Ford, who has owned the 200m all season and is back to defend the title she won as a freshman. She’s run three of six fastest 200m times in the nation this year and has once again produced impressive leg after impressive leg for the Gamecocks’ 4x400m. If she takes the win, she’ll become the sixth woman in NCAA history to win two indoor one-lap titles. In the weight throw Wyoming’s Daniel Reynolds, only the second collegian to break the 25 meter barrier and the first in a decade, will attempt to hold off two other entrants on the top-10 list in Ryan Johnson and Trey Knight.

USC’s Johnny Brackins has only lost one 60m hurdles race all year, but it’s an understandable one: he finished third at U.S. indoors in a mostly-professional field. When collegiate competition is all he faces, Brackins is pretty unstoppable and won the Big Ten title by 0.16 seconds, a ridiculous margin of victory in a deep conference and such a short event.