Joey Logano’s win shows why
NASCAR’s playoff system is broken
If you want to watch great racing this year, you might want to look past NASCAR. Why? It’s all about the playoffs.
NASCAR’s playoff system, the Chase for the Sprint Cup, is neither necessary nor effective, casting doubt on the sport. In my opinion, it’s the most controversial change that NASCAR has introduced in the last twenty years.
Take Joey Logano’s win at Daytona on Sunday as an example. The Chase selection rules value drivers that win during the regular season, prioritizing them for inclusion. Using last year as a benchmark — assuming 14 drivers win at least one race through the end of the regular season — it doesn’t matter whether Logano wins 25 more races or whether he never again finishes above 10th place. Either way, he’s effectively locked into the playoffs after just one race.
Does that sound like a fair basis for a playoff?
Everything that’s wrong with the Chase
The 2003 Winston Cup Series (the last under the Winston brand) was marred by controversy. Matt Kenseth’s championship win, the first since 1973 that a driver won with only one victory, had fans clamoring for a change. Ryan Newman, who led all drivers with eight wins that season, only finished sixth in the standings. This fueled the rationale for proponents of change: winning should be the mark of a champion, not mere consistency. The Chase hasn’t made the situation better though.
By having a playoff in any format, you penalize drivers who win early in the season. Those wins are driven, in part, by NASCAR’s schedule which is not uniformly distributed. There are 23 tracks on the Sprint Cup circuit — some of which are used twice a year, a couple of which are featured only in the Chase, and others that are only scheduled during the regular season. By instituting a playoff system, you create a set of tracks that are more important than others. A system where drivers better at those tracks have a better chance to win the championship.
Jimmie Johnson has benefited in this regard, winning six championships under the Chase format. Since becoming a full-time driver in 2002, he has an overall average finish of 11.76. But is this weighted equally across tracks? No. Johnson has an career average finish of 9.30 at the 13 tracks that have hosted a Chase race (including races that take place earlier in the season), and an average finish of 14.63 at the other 11 tracks. That spread, a little more than five track positions, marks the difference between his six Sprint Cup championships and the mere two he would have won under the old points system.
This is the true legacy of the Chase for the Cup — an uneven playing field.
There have been three major revisions to the Chase format after its inception, causing confusion among even dedicated fans of the sport. The Chase was questionable enough in its original format — the new system implemented last year just makes it worse, and has broken several eye tests for sporting parity:
Early wins allow drivers to coast to the Chase
I mentioned in the intro that Joey Logano doesn’t need to win anymore — at least not until September. Theoretically he still has sponsor obligations though, not to mention NASCAR prodding him to keep racing.
But does he need to race at 100% intensity? No.
Can he experiment along the way — testing new car modifications and schemes that could reduce his competitive advantage across individual races? Definitely.
What does this mean for the other drivers, the ones who need track position up until the Chase deadline, who are racing alongside him? It seems to me that this system creates a competitive imbalance, similar to clinched NFL teams late in the season, whose opponents benefit by playing them late in the year. Don’t tell me that Joey Logano is going to race down to the wire against any driver in September when he’s already punched his Chase ticket in February.
Selection rules lead to massive disparities
The new system gives preference to drivers who have won a race during the season. This leads to scenarios like the one going into the Chase last year:
AJ Allmendinger: 1 win, 2 top-fives, 4 top-tens, 611 points, 24th place
Kyle Larson: 0 wins, 5 top-fives, 11 top-tens, 737 points, 12th place
If you’re wondering who made the Chase, it wasn’t Larson. By any rational standard Larson was the more deserving driver, and he went on to not only out-gain Allmendinger by 59 points during the Chase time period, but also win Rookie of the Year honors. NASCAR has tried to establish its preference for winners here, but as we saw last year…
…Elimination stages reward consistency, not wins
Wins during each Chase elimination stage give drivers an automatic berth to the next round, but getting top-tens in each race seems like enough to secure a pass as well. We saw last year that Ryan Newman, with zero wins, was in a position to win the championship in the final race, while Brad Keselowski, with six wins on the season, was eliminated with just a couple bad races in an elimination stage.
That last race, the Sprint Cup Championship, is the only true “winner-take-all” race, with four drivers remaining to contend for the championship (leading to scenarios where Jeff Gordon, despite having the most points on the full season from actual races, again missed a chance for his fifth championship). Not that the champion has to win this race though. He could finish second, third, fourth … to reduce it to the most extreme scenario, a driver could win by finishing as low as 40th, as long as the other three drivers are behind in the final results.
Bottom line: it is more likely under the current system than ever before that a driver can win the championship without winning a single race. This completely contradicts NASCAR’s rationale for the Chase.
So why have playoffs at all in racing?
The concept of a playoff in NASCAR is muddled and unclear. What purpose does a playoff serve in a sport where all full-time drivers race on a, more or less, even playing field across the full season?
From race to race, you see the same set of full-time drivers — from Jeff Gordon to Alex Bowman — comprising roughly 35 of the 43 drivers that will compete at each of the 36 Sprint Cup races each year. Contrast this with the National Football League where, given the length of the 16-game season, it isn’t actually possible to play all teams an equal number of times each season, let alone a game in each team’s stadium. That’s why you don’t see a playoff in the English Premier League, which employs a double round robin schedule. A playoff system there would not increase the chance of crowning a more deserving champion.
We can’t ignore NASCAR’s desire for increasing its entertainment value though. The current playoff system theoretically ensures that every race is meaningful — why watch a late season race (in the old format) when the points leader is coasting to the championship?
This argument doesn’t quite hold up to scrutiny. In 2003, Matt Kenseth clinched with one race to go in the season. The year prior, Tony Stewart won the championship in the final race of the 2002 season. Truthfully, only a handful of times has a driver clinched the championship more than one race before the end of a season (the last being Dale Earnhardt in 1994). This was hardly a regular occurrence, which underscores how much of an overreaction fans had to Kenseth’s 2003 championship.
Furthermore, merely having a playoff is no guarantee of continuous viewership/attendance, as Major League Baseball can attest. NASCAR’s ratings have been declining for ten years, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this decline has paralleled the existence of the Chase for the Cup. Fans are voting with their remotes, increasingly to playoff-less Formula 1. It would be foolish for NASCAR’s executives to look at this evidence and conclude that the current system is working.
It’s time to get rid of the Chase
Does the Chase make races exciting for fans? Sure, if you admit the fact that it can disincentivize superior racing. Will I continue to watch NASCAR? Sure, it still has individually entertaining races beyond the overarching championship theme (I’ve always been a sucker for a road course race). Will I ever recommend the sport to others? Not anymore — I don’t trust that the Chase will reward fans’ dedication to a single driver over the course of the full season, and isn’t that the whole point?
I’m a Jeff Gordon fan — I’ve followed him since the first race I saw in 1997. Under the old points system, I had faith that if Gordon kept having good races, that he’d always be in a position to win a championship. If you’ve been reading this article, you might understand why, given his looming retirement at the end of this year, I don’t see much of a reason to keep following the sport regularly.
Here’s to hoping that NASCAR sees the error in its ways, and goes back to the system that never failed in the first place.
