Which is exactly what I do with my cyclists during the racing season. In the winter (off season) we start in the fall with the novice program as written, then adjust as needed from there. For 2-4 weeks at the end of the cycling year, we do nothing but lift. It's worked out really well, especially with the enduros.
My lower back has recommended one be careful with rowing and deadlifting. Definitely Deadlift, but schedule it before a rest day. Even deadlifting before a lighter technical day can be tricky if the coach is going to have you work postural issues or pauses at the catch.
Casually I've observed a lack of coaching depth at the club/high school level and D3 schools, compared to the EARC schools. So a you've got a lot of coaches who don't understand how strong our national team guys are (or, the guys who last year were the top college guys). Scheduling a lifting day and now breaking out dead lifting is getting complicated, so it gets dropped. Its a lot easier to just have everyone do jumpies and sit ups because everyone else does that too.
My assertion is based on the OP's mention of "relative strength" and my assumption that he was referring to "relative power". In road cycling, the training for which I'm most familiar with, the primary determinant of success is W/Kg power at LT. These athletes will typically train to achieve the highest FTP possible and then lean out as much as they can until FTP starts to suffer, which I assume is the means to achieve optimize power output for this kind of athlete.
Certainly, absolute power, which is useful for time-trialists and track cyclists, will increase with increased mass, but are you suggesting that relative power will also increase?
I am not familiar with the term "relative power".
Ah, jumpies. Good times.
I was at an EARC school, actually. I don't mean to imply that our strength and conditioning program was bad; far from it, actually. Stopping cleans and deadlifts just always seemed weird to me (and I wish I'd learned to squat below parallel properly). I don't necessarily think we should have been doing deadlifts once we were back on the water in the spring, but deadlifting during winter training seems like a no brainer. For all I know the coach wasn't really confortable teaching them and didn't want to or couldn't get the strength coach to teach us. Of course, this was over 20 years ago (yikes), and I don't know how the crews train for strength these days.
Power relative to mass, at least in the case of my particular argument. In cycling terms this is expressed as watts per kilogram. This matters most when the skinny little dudes are headed uphill. I imagine that for most other endurance events, absolute power is a better determinant of success and I would certainly agree that more lean mass would likely lead to greater absolute power output (at LT) for most athletes, especially those that aren't already extraordinarily well adapted to their particular event.
So watts per kilo does not go up if you gain 10 lbs. of muscle and your squat goes up 125 lbs?