I can’t think of much sports-wise that’s happening this weekend.
Right? Nothing super notable … wait, what’s that? Oh, right.
Fully kidding. This weekend is huge. Four — that’s right, four — championships will be decided this weekend (including Friday, Nov. 4) in the Southwest (five counting the ARCA Menards Series West). Games 6 and (if necessary) 7 of the Houston Astros-Philadelphia Phillies World Series will be played in Houston, on the heels of the first no-hitter in MLB’s title fight since 1956.
A little over 1,000 miles to the west, Phoenix Raceway hosts its third annual NASCAR title weekend, where the NASCAR Camping World Truck, NASCAR Xfinity and NASCAR Cup series will all see their champions crowned.
It’s been one hell of a year, and we’re coming off a weekend in which one teammate was wrecked by another and then Ross Chastain pulled off a video-game move for the ages to salvage his chances at a title.
We’ll focus on Cup competition here, but Trucks and Xfinity have had their own quirks this year: at one point, the number of part-time or one-off drivers who scored Truck Series wins surpassed full-timers (Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course in July with Parker Kligerman‘s victory, for example), whereas in Xfinity we’ve had Noah Gragson and Ty Gibbs combining to win 14 races, while the regular season points champion AJ Allmendinger has been knocked out of the postseason. Gibbs dominated early in the season, while Gragson just reeled off four straight wins in September.
There’s plenty of silly season speculation and news to go around in the weeks after Phoenix, but how in the world did we get here? Nineteen different winners, two unprecedented Championship 4 contenders … let’s just look back.
We headed into 2022 with Kyle Larson as the reigning champion, having won 10 races — more than a quarter of the season — in 2021 and some expecting further dominance from the No. 5.
Oh, how wrong that was.
The aforementioned 19 different winners span well over half of the 32 slated full-time drivers to start the season, no one particularly dominant at a specific type or length of track and only one instance of a driver winning two weeks in a row (that is, unless Christopher Bell ends up the race winner and champion this weekend to go back-to-back to end the season).
Newly anointed owner-driver Brad Keselowski and newly named RFK Racing had a fantastic Speedweeks, the 2012 champion and his teammate Chris Buescher…
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