NASCAR’s In-Season Tournament, which will debut in 2025 on TNT Sports and Amazon Prime, already boats a million-dollar prize to the driver who emerges victorious throughout all five rounds of head-to-head match-ups but is that enough?
On one hand, some fans already view the concept as a gimmick and distraction from the goal of winning races and accumulating points but it’s also a fair rebuttal that the tournament will take place in the middle of the regular season where there is a bit of an interest lull until the championship chase.
And NASCAR’s format, which resets the standings for those who make the playoffs, more or less dismisses the impact of any decisions made to negatively impact the championship.
For the most part, racers like it conceptually.
Christopher Bell called it a ‘great addition to the sport’ and that the ‘head-to-head match-ups’ are going to create strategy wrinkles.
Chase Briscoe called it a potential ‘huge thing for our sport’ given the current sports betting climate.
“You look at March Madness and how everyone in the general population fills out brackets,” Briscoe said. “I don’t think we’ll get that sort of interest but if you look at the landscape, sports betting, anytime you can create something like this, it will create a buzz around the sport and attract everyday sports bettors to drop some odds on us.
“And if they’re doing that, they’re probably going to watch the races as well, so I’m excited to be part of it and I think it will be a lot of fun.”
Briscoe also articulated what will bother some but intrigue others.
“It’s going to be an interesting dynamic because if you reach the final four or eight, you might go off strategy and do something totally different than everyone else to beat the driver you are matched up against.
“Something that might even hurt you in the regular season. The risk versus reward of that can be fun and exciting.
“I do think there needs to be some incentive beyond the million dollars, which is awesome, but I think five bonus points would be really cool,” Briscoe said. “I don’t know about a playoff spot because we’ve made wins so important. I don’t know about a guy that ends up running 14th and the other guy finished 20th and that’s a plaoff berth.”
At the same time, whoever wins the tournament is likely already a playoff driver as William Byron defeated Brad Keselowski in the finals of the Denny Hamlin Bracket Challenge last year, for example.
Christopher Bell endorsed the idea of paying five playoff points to the winner as well.
Why?
“Because playoff points are the most important thing in our sport and they are the hardest thing to come by,” he said. “This wouldn’t be a freebie either. If you win the whole tournament, I feel like that is something that is equivalent to winning a race and should be paid out as such.”
Byron wasn’t so sure about that.
“I think the money is incentive enough,” Byron said. “If I look at other sports and how they did it, like the NBA, we’re following that blueprint. It starts to feel like a gimmick if you start paying out playoff points. There are a lot of inconsistencies already when it comes to who makes the final round.”
And the reason he says that is that the in-season tournament starts at Atlanta, a diet superspeedway race.
“I say that,” Byron continued, “is that you could be paired up against a really good superspeedway racer, or you get caught up in a crash, and they advance. I don’t know. I think the money is enough incentive personally.
Hamlin said it’s all ‘something to think about’ when it comes to giving the tournament championship implications.
“I don’t think they have nailed down what that could be yet,” Hamlin said. “One playoff point seems kind of low and five sounds adequate. If they choose to do nothing, that’s okay too, because a million dollars is fine.
“Down the line, I like the idea of spreading money across the teams as they advance, to reward their pit stops and the work that goes into advancing. I like the idea of spotlight the whole teams as they advance but I think they’ll refine the idea as it goes along.”
Matt Weaver is a Motorsports Insider for Sportsnaut. Follow him on Twitter.