The first version of the NASCAR Cup Series elimination playoff format was extremely flawed.
However random you believe the version that just concluded over the weekend is, understand that the initial iteration was way worse and needed a necessary adjustment in 2017 after three years of not rewarding regular season excellence.
There was regular season champion Jeff Gordon in 2014, who bookended second place finishes around the incident with Brad Keselowski at Texas and was eliminated without any real buffer going into the Round of 8 as a result.
Ryan Newman that year, (in)famously caught momentum in the playoffs and advanced to the Final Four without a single win, finishing second to Kevin Harvick at the Homestead finale.
William Byron in the 2016 Truck Series Round of 8 comes to mind too, having won a division leading six times and finished sixth and eighth in the first two races, but was eliminated due a random engine failure in the penultimate race.
No matter how you feel about what has happened in the years since, there was a real impropriety to it all.
So, NASCAR responded with playoff points designed to marry regular season success with the small sample size dramatics of a playoff format. Stage wins were awarded a playoff point so that racing throughout the race had consequence and each win provided five playoff points that were added to seeding at the start of each round.
The regular season standings, which fans rightfully decried as being meaningless the first three years of the elimination format, was then given consequence in the form of 15 playoff points to the leader after 26 races, 10 to second place, eight to third and so forth throughout the top-10.
It was an example of the industry coming together to address concerns with the format, which everyone seemed to agree didn’t previously reward season long excellence and did not provide enough protection in the playoffs for those who were great all year.
Guess what, it has largely worked.
For everyone who says the regular season champion or top seed needs to be given a free pass to the championship race, Tyler Reddick raced for the championship this year and last year’s top seeded driver, Martin Truex Jr., advanced all the way to the Round of 8 and still had a chance to make the final four despite a sudden inability to even run inside the top-10 anymore to that point of that season.
Short of a free pass, the system provides multiple levels of security to those who win races or have tremendous regular season consistency, but there comes a point where they also have to execute during each round.
So, what are we, the collective NASCAR industry and fan base trying to fix here, after Joey Logano won his third championship in seven years all under this format?
This is what happened to cause the stir:
The Round of 8 saw three drivers, all below the cutline, who had no other pathway to the Final Four but to win do just that. And as a result, it bumped three of the top overall performers from the season in Kyle Larson, Christopher Bell and Denny Hamlin out.
Hamlin, by the way, was already at a disadvantage due to the engine seal penalty placed on his team near the end of the summer and Larson has to wonder what could have been had he not missed the Coca-Cola 600, five playoff points, and had a chance at least seven more.
So, if that’s problem number one, it’s hard to sit here and argue that it’s a problem that needs fixing. The system was designed to emphasize winning races. It’s what made the final laps at Homestead so dramatic because Hamlin and Ryan Blaney knew that very well could have been their only shot to make the Final Four.
It certainly turned out to be true for Hamlin and Blaney responded by winning the next week at Martinsville.
Do we, as a sport, not want the culture at the end of the season, when there should be the most consequences to be about winning races and instead placing a value on finishing fourth to seventh instead?
It’s hard to reconcile.
There seems to be some degree of pity for at least Larson and Bell, but they didn’t win at a critical juncture when they showed us they were capable as any team all year long. Sure, they suffered misfortune but that is what NASCAR gave them playoff points in exchange for their regular season success.
They earned the free passes through multiple rounds as a reward for their regular season success but there comes a certain point where if you are that good then go validate it.
So how do we, once again the collective industry, solve this perceived problem?
Is it once again emphasizing the ability to finish seventh more often than not? The majority seems to be on board to preferring the 10-race Chase for the Championship over any version of the status quo and that was certainly the fairest format from a fuller body of work standpoint.
But it’s certainly going to make the results feel less consequential when protecting points, having a good points day, becomes more valuable than getting to the finish line first — you know, the thing everyone in the sport professes to care the absolute most about more than anything.
Austin Dillon, no matter how unethical his decision making at Richmond was, only felt compelled to win that way under the conviction that a single victory could be so transformative. Ditto Harrison Burton and Kyle Busch lining up side-by-side in the summer race or Busch chasing down Chase Briscoe in the final laps at Darlington.
Those moments become less consequential, less dramatic and less meaningful the moment NASCAR reverts back to rewarding finishing seventh over finishing first.
And while everyone likes to remember the 2004 and 2011 Chase for the Championship finales, those titles were more or less decided before Homestead too, so just know what you are asking for here.
Also any proposed format that makes the regular season a points race, then makes the playoffs about winning creates an ideological schism. Ditto deciding the championship with three races instead of one, because that makes the entire season about winning up until the final three, and then it’s about finishing seventh.
Again, it’s just a logical schism that seems hard to reconcile.
We, once again the Royal We, are starting to do this once a decade, you know. Matt Kenseth won his championship the nickel and dime way with one win in 2003 the same year that Ryan Newman won eight times.
So then came a decade of the Chase for the Championship, and well, Jimmie Johnson won six of those in 10 years so back to the drawing board.
Logano now won three of these in the past seven, all after NASCAR added the emphasis on regular season success. But, because he won it without finishing seventh more often than not over the full 36, this somehow invalidated the four races he won (not even counting the million dollar All-Star Race) and executing a clinic for how to surgically win in those pivotal junctures en route to the championship.
It’s really hard to come up with an obvious solution that isn’t emphasizing seventh-place finishes, and I know how obnoxious that is going to come across to some of the most purist leaning race fans, but what do we want here?
NASCAR has already provided the added incentive to have regular season success, but those teams simply got beat in the most consequential moments the past two years.
Maybe if the final race was at Homestead, which it should be on race quality anyway, that will mitigate some of this because it’s obvious that Team Penske has a yet insurmountable advantage there right now.
Should NASCAR offer more playoff points for regular season points earning success? Okay, sure, but that still doesn’t change what Logano, Reddick and Blaney were all able to accomplish in the Round of 8, and that was a feature, not a bug of the system.
And really, it’s clear this is about Logano, more than the system because this narrative didn’t exist last year when Blaney did not have that much of a different season than the one that ultimately won a championship last year.
17.4 average finish to 14.1
Four wins (plus the All Star) to three wins
414 laps led to 562
13 top-10s to 18 top-10s
7 top-5s to 8 top-5s
15th, regular season points to 13th, regular season points
Where was this outrage last year? It didn’t exist.
So, what are the reasons we’re having these conversations right now? Is it the deep unpopularity Logano has with a subset of race fans? Is it that he was practically eliminated before the 48 failed weight requirements after the Roval?
It’s hard to logically reconcile why this is a topic of conversation right now, especially when, again, NASCAR made those changes in 2017 to make its playoff format more equitable.
Ultimately, based on the 21 years of having this conversation every 10 years, it’s just a reminder that we, the collective we, are not going to find a perfect solution that both meets everyone’s competition standards while also making for a compelling TV show.
And for the ‘racing is not football’ crowd, FOX and NBC can’t tell you the difference, because they want their own March Madness or Wild Card game, choose your analogy. It’s also why Amazon Prime and Turner Sports are getting an in-season tournament.
The aforementioned races with consequence is the point.
It was also the point to the Lucas Oil Late Model Series, Australian Supercars Series, Turismo Carretera, SMART Modified Tour, CRA Super Late Model Series and Hickory Motor Speedway all adopting playoff formats.
Up until 2004, but more so 2014, racing was about the overall body of work. That was the standard, but in the television and social media age, expanded playoffs is what every sport is about.
The World Series used to be the team with the National League’s best record versus the American League team with the best record, then came the League Championship Series, then a decade later saw the Divisional Round, a Wild Card Game and now a Wild Card Series.
NCAA Football had the AP national championship, the BCS national championship, the final four playoffs and now a 12-team playoffs. March Madness was the original format designed to create upsets like what Joey Logano successfully navigated over the past 10 weeks.
The 2006 83-78 St. Louis Cardinals won a World Series. The 47-35 Houston Rockets won the NBA Finals. The undefeated 2007 New England Patriots lost the Super Bowl.
Thats sports, man.
And you can say NASCAR should exist on its own historical island but that simply isn’t what FOX, Turner, Amazon and NBC are paying for and there just needs to be a degree of intellectual awareness about that relationship.
Ultimately, NASCAR is going to do what it did after the 2016 season and see if there is a fairer way to determine a champion and its officials should be applauded for that openness. Just remember, based on the past 21 years, that every solution begets another problem and it’s going to lead us right back to this conversation again come 2035.
Like clockwork.