OK, I guess I’m going to be that guy.
I do not hate the playoffs.
And I am more or less unbothered that Joey Logano — who only won once in the regular season after saving an ungodly amount of fuel at Nashvillle Superspeedway — went on to win his third career NASCAR Cup Series championship on Sunday (Nov. 10).
Good for him.
He’s done what others before him did: got hot — or maybe humid? — at the right time.
He competed under the same rules as everyone else. He did what he needed to when it counted the most.
The other playoff contenders didn’t.
The near hysteria over Logano even being in the Championship 4 — which NASCAR President Steve Phelps went out of his way to defend during his State of the Sport address on Friday (Nov. 8) — has boggled my mind.
In 11 years of the elimination format, we finally got a weird champion!
I mean, we were one restart away from getting one in the very first year of this format.
Remember Ryan Newman somehow, someway making it to the Championship 4 in 2014 despite not having won a *single* race all season?
Wouldn’t that have been awesome?
It took awhile, but Matt Crafton finally broke that glass ceiling in the NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series in 2019. He did that with zero wins and only seven top fives.
An outlier like Logano’s championship was bound to happen.
That’s what happens when NASCAR has a “win-and-you’re-in” format and also 16 possible slots to account for.
Logano got the championship through skill (winning at Atlanta Motor Speedway), another team’s mistake (Alex Bowman‘s DQ at the Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL), strategy (winning at Las Vegas Motor Speedway) and beating the other guys straight up at Phoenix Raceway.
It was a combination of a fluke and almost every possible way you can win a race.
And last I checked, I thought underdogs were supposed to be celebrated?
Anyway, NASCAR might deliver something to everyone who thinks the current format is an abomination to mankind (to the person on X, formerly Twitter, who said Logano winning was worse than Dale Earnhardt Sr. dying … what the hell?).
🤔 “Is that the best way to do it?” #NASCAR‘s Elton Sawyer says the sanctioning body is willing to look at the playoff format during the offseason.
More ➡️ https://t.co/MKhd9eLXG8 pic.twitter.com/KVcCEkLcTX
— SiriusXM NASCAR Radio (Ch. 90) (@SiriusXMNASCAR) November 12, 2024
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