Region of Death?
With region meets next week, the phrase "Region of Death" typically gets associated with March Madness brackets but more locally with cross county it has become synonymous with Region 6 which is comprised mostly of Williamson and Davidson County schools. Note this tweet from 2019.
The question becomes, is this designation assigned accurately to the
correct region or is another stronger based on recent history?
Here's the first way I thought to look at this... using cross country scoring. In 2019, the qualifiers from Region 6 went on to place 4th, 6th, and 14th in the overall team standings. The cumulative score of their placement was 24 points and compared that to the rest of the seven remaining regions and here are the results.
| 2019 | Region 1 | Region 2 | Region 3 | Region 4 |
| Team 1 | 8 | 5 | 20 | 1 |
| Team 2 | 11 | 9 | 21 | 3 |
| Team 3 | 18 | 12 | 24 | 19 |
| Total | 37 | 26 | 65 | 23 |
| 2019 | Region 5 | Region 6 | Region 7 | Region 8 |
| Team 1 | 10 | 4 | 13 | 2 |
| Team 2 | 15 | 6 | 22 | 7 |
| Team 3 | 16 | 14 | 23 | 17 |
| Total | 41 | 24 | 58 | 26 |
By the metric of "low cumulative score," in 2019 it appears as if Region 4, the region that housed Siegel and Central Magnet, could lay claim to that title however after you could also define "Region of Death" by another metric.
If you're argument is "this is the hardest region to qualify out of" then you wouldn't so much weight the top end of the region as much as you would the third place team. Sure, Siegel won and Central Magnet got third but the last qualifier got 19th whereas in Region 2 (Hardin Valley, Farragut, Maryville) they all placed 12th or better. Both are legitimate arguments to make but no determination can be made from just one set of results. We expanded this and the following are the results of this tabulation over the previous four year classification cycle for both boys and girls.