With The Olympics coming to a conclusion, sports fans can return to arbitrarily rooting for teams and individuals rather than using a nationalist framework to guide fandom. The closure of the games also means a shift back to all the other goofy ways of scoring sports, like football and its goofy points scheme and NASCAR and its stage wins and however else the drivers accumulate points.
With two weeks off to forget about the sport, NASCAR returns to action this weekend with the Trucks and Cup series doing their drive-in-circles thing at Richmond. What is utterly fascinating is the approaches the two series have going into this weekend. Having last raced on July 19th, the trucks are coming off their hiatus to…wrap up the regular season.
That’s right; this weekendʻs race is the one that sets the playoffs, which begin in two weeks’ time in Milwaukee. While in some sports, the concept of bye weeks is meant to provide an opportunity for dominant teams/players to rest while their less successful peers battle it out, the three-week layoff for the Trucks drivers is just another one of the quirks in the scheduling that never makes sense with the series.
Hence, after a break, the teams and drivers return to the track for one race that determines the field and the seeding for the playoffs. That makes sense. Or something. But then again, not only has the schedule been goofy for some time now, but the other aspect is that the announcers have been talking about the playoffs, oh, since the season started.
Forgive me if I argue that all of the playoff talk actually loses me sometimes. The fact that the three national touring series fail to start the playoffs at the same time makes the whole endeavor even more silly.
It would be easy to turn the focus here into one of disparaging the playoffs altogether and hoping/wishing/pushing for their downfall and for them never to exist again. That’s not the goal. Those columns have all been written for years and by scribes smarter than me. That is a cottage industry at this point that finally needs to close its doors and recognize that whether or not the old system was better has nothing to do with how things are now. The playoffs are part of the sport whether we like it or not. From a dialectical behavior theorist’s perspective, it is what it is.
The unaligned structure of things is where the sport takes goofy and moves to asinine. If the playoffs for the Trucks starts on August 25, then…
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