NASCAR’s championship format is still fine!
It’s not perfect, and it encourages the occasional shishshow like on Friday night in the Truck Series, but then you get races like on Saturday and Sunday where the best of NASCAR shines through and largely delivers everything this dynamic was intended to produce.
Some will take exception to a Cup Series champion like Ryan Blaney because the No. 12 team was not exceptional throughout the summer months but that isn’t how success is quantified anymore. Those are not the rules anyone has signed up for over the past 10 years since this format was introduced.
The new status quo permits teams to get aggressive or creative with set-ups and asks drivers to go above and beyond in the pursuit of winning races to entertain you, while minimizing the consequences if it doesn’t work out over the first 26 races of the season.
“It was a good points day,” that tired cliche that normalized complacency is dead.
At the same time, it also rewards the teams who do everything the previous systems asked of them in providing bonus points for yearlong excellence.
Yes, Blaney got exceptionally hot over the final six weeks of the season, and that speed resulted in his first Cup Series championship but that is the point of a playoff. It’s part and parcel of why both Major League Baseball and the National Football League have recently expanded their playoff fields.
Sports across the board, and NASCAR for better or worse views itself the same way, has decided it wants championships to be decided under the most pressure packed of situations over the final 10 weeks in the same way as the Stanley Cup or NBA Finals.
The Texas Rangers and Arizona Diamondbacks met in a World Series that produced the lowest overall win total in the 119-year history of organized baseball and that is absolutely the byproduct of an expanded postseason.
Baseball concluded, and it did so as early as 1969 when it created a penultimate playoff series to reach the World Series, that success should be measured in the big moments and not in the course of a 162-game season.
It proved so successful that they expanded the World Series and League Championship Series to include the Divisional Round and now a Wild Card Round. The NFL now has an expanded Wild Card round as well.
The parallel, if you’re not picking up on it, is the equivalent to trading a greater sense of consequence in the playoffs compared to a 36-race season long points battle.
What NASCAR has done over the past 10 years specifically allows for a team like the Penske No. 12 group to suffer setbacks and defeats over the summer and never sellout in preparation for next season. It keeps well-over 20 fanbases invested deep into August knowing that one victory can change everything.
Blaney is the equivalent of a MLB or NFL Wild Card, a team that made some moves in the middle of the year to get better, and reaped the benefits of it in September, October and November. They are the Texas Rangers.
Martin Truex Jr., the regular season champion failed to make his World Series equivalent in every way the Atlanta Braves and Baltimore Orioles failed to reach their ultimate goal, despite being saved round after round by his playoff points – the rough equivalent of a home field advantage.
Blaney, crew chief Jonathan Hassler and their No. 12 teams are worthy champions, not despite the format, but because of it. They routinely entered races at a deficit over the past 10 weeks, winning at Talladega and Martinsville when it mattered the most.
Even on Sunday at Phoenix, in a microcosm of their entire season, they were behind Byron and the Hendrick Motorsports No. 24 early but kept working on their car. They were ahead of the track changes as it took rubber and tightened up.
Blaney even lost the championship lead to Kyle Larson before the final restart, a testament to the Hendrick Motorsports No. 5 pit crew, but would not be denied.
How can someone really question the legitimacy of a champion in this format when it tests every facet of a team over the course of 10 weeks and then within the final four race itself? Historically, losing that race off pit road should have been it for Blaney but he just would not accept that outcome.
When you beat Larson, for all the accolades the industry places on him, in a head-to-head battle, that makes you a champion. When you beat the team that was arguably the best all year, and that No. 24 team was certainly that, it makes you a champion.
Not only a champions, but an absolutely deserving champion.
The obvious rebuttal to this format was what happened on Friday, everything that happened on Friday, with championship leaders taking each other out, obvious retaliations and just countless wrecks. It’s the format’s fault the masses shouted when it was in fact just an awful case of bad race craft from a group of racers that really do know better.
The Xfinity Series responded on Saturday with an absolute clinic for how a championship should be decided under this format and the Cup Series did the same on Sunday.
Is a championship devalued under this format? Yes, marginally, but absolutely. It’s a trade-off, right? It’s an exchange of values, trading off the season long consistency for validating greatness in a series of single high-pressure moments.
Are the New York Giants of Super Bowl XLII any less of a champion for reaching the Super Bowl as a wild card and defeating the undefeated New England Patriots?
Absolutely not.
The Giants survived as monthlong gauntlet, executed when it mattered, and hoisted the Vince Lombardi Trophy.
We’re not a stick and ball sport, someone will inevitably retort and this isn’t about sports, but life in general — responding to the biggest moments positively or negatively and reaping whatever comes from it.
This format isn’t perfect, and neither was the Team Penske No. 12 team over the past nine months, but that’s not what this is about anymore. It’s not the Winston Cup anymore.
Appreciate what Blaney and his cohorts did over the past 10 weeks because it’s something to be equally celebrated.
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.