The NASCAR playoffs aren’t going anywhere but NASCAR senior leadership is open to tweaking the format if an off-season review generates appropriate ideas.
That was the gist from senior vice president of competition Elton Sawyer when asked about the topic on Tuesday morning during his weekly appearance on SiriusXM NASCAR Radio.
How Joey Logano ultimately won the championship has been a subject of scrutiny the past two days because he finished the season with the lowest average finish (17.1) of any champion in Cup Series history while also not leading the division in any statistical category.
For posterity, the previous lowest average finish for a champion in Cup Series history was Ryan Blaney (14.1) last year and this is every bit a reflection of spec car parity as it in the playoff format. Logano, like Blaney before him, did not have a particularly impressive regular season but made it into the Round of 16 and strategically won three times over the final 10 en route to the championship.
In a playoff format, winning late with frequency is the easiest pathway to the Bill France Cup.
“We look at it this way — you look at our format, it has delivered some great, exciting moments over time,” Sawyer said. “Joey [Logano] won five races this year, if you count. the All-Star Race. He has shown year-in and year-out, time and time again, that once he gets into the Playoffs — and they just barely got in this year […]. Joey and Team Penske, they win races at the right time of year, and our format has delivered.”
“We talked about it last week and the event we had at Martinsville. The moment was Ryan Blaney driving through the field, passing really good cars to win that race to get to the Championship race, you don’t have those moments without our format.”
But again, given that Logano spent most of the regular season outside of the top-15 in the championship standings before winning on fuel mileage at Nashville in quintuple overtime just to make the playoffs and that left a subset of the fan base in a sour mood.
Logano advanced through the playoffs by winning a drafting race at Atlanta to open the Round of 16. He only advanced out of the Round of 12 due to an Alex Bowman disqualification after the Charlotte Roval. He then immediately advanced to the final four by winning the next week at Las Vegas.
For his part, the three-time champion took exception to those critical of his championship path.
“For someone to say this isn’t real, it’s a bunch of bullshit in my opinion,” Logano said. “That’s wrong. This is something that everyone knows the rules when the season starts. We figured out how to do it the best and figured out how to win. It’s what (Team Penske) has been able to do for the last three years.
“I don’t like people talking that way because if the rules were the old way, we would play it out differently, wouldn’t we?”
At the same time, several marquee Cup Series participants, past and present, have also called for off-season changes and Sawyer said the sanctioning body is going to take it under advisement.
“We get it, we understand it, and as we’ve said, and Steve O’Donnell and Steve Phelps mentioned it in the State of The Sport press conference on Saturday,” Sawyer added. “We’re going to have Playoffs, we’re going to have a Playoff format, but what we will do, is we will take input from our fans, our competitors, and our industry stakeholders this off-season, and if there is a way to tweak it, make it better, we will do that.”
“I think as we take a deeper dive and look at this and look at how you get in the Playoffs, and how you get from round to round. Is that equitable? Is that the best way to do it? I think you take all that input — and we have some really smart people in our industry, with our teams and drivers, and being able to get feedback — maybe what we have is the best model, but if it’s not, we’re open, we’re all ears on it.”
“We have some ideas, but we want to make sure as an industry, we’re doing the right thing for our sport and the right thing to crown our champions.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.
