Fresh off his third championship in seven years, Joey Logano likes the current NASCAR Cup Series Playoff format, but it’s not a popular sentiment amongst his peers right now.
In one of the top stories of the early offseason, everyone seems to have a different take on how to improve the way championship are crowned after 36 races.
The pushback to the 11-year status quo is a reflection of two consecutive years in which the eventual champion did not have the most complete season but executed in all the key moments over the final 10 races.
Logano had four wins but his 17.4 average finish was the worst of any champion in NASCAR history and the underlying statistics were equally pedestrian.
But again, Logano won in quintuple overtime at Nashville to qualify for the playoffs, won the playoff opener at Atlanta to advance into the Round of 12, caught a lucky break in the form of an Alex Bowman disqualification to advance into the Round of 8, won the next week at Las Vegas to make the final four and then won it all at Phoenix.
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Logano also won the non-points All-Star Race at North Wilkesboro that paid a million dollars as well. His teammate, Austin Cindric says not enough respect is being placed around Logano responding to the most consequential moments.
“Joey won five races, and that has gotten lost in all this,” Cindric said. “That’s a lot of freaking wins and he won them at the right time too. That’s an example of a guy, that when he smells blood in the water, he rarely misses.”
For Logano to have fluked his way into the championship, it’s now happened three times in seven years and his No. 22 team has made it to the final four literally every other year since this format debuted in 2014.
“Everyone is going to have opinions on that,” Logano said. “I think we all need to understand why we changed it in the first place. The fans said they didn’t like (the previous format) so we changed it.
“Everybody loved it and it was great. Now we’re going to complain about it again. Come on, guys. Jeez.”
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For decades, NASCAR used a season-long points accumulation system but Matt Kenseth won the 2003 championship with only one victory while Ryan Newman had eight wins but no consistency and a lot of DNFs to finish sixth.
So NASCAR came up with the Chase for the Championship, a 10-race points battle amongst the top points-earners over 26 races but Jimmie Johnson won six championships in 10 years and some of those battles were more or less decided by the final race as well.
They were inspired by Tony Stewart and Carl Edwards finishing the 2011 Chase in a tie, however. The sport has a 10-race, elimination format, that ends with a one-race, four-driver, best finisher amongst them wins the championship format.
It places an emphasis on timely wins and small sample size eliminations that former teammate Brad Keselowski says is a mandate from NASCAR’s TV partners.
“I think we have media partners who really, really think the playoffs are great and it’s important to make them happy,” Keselowski said. “And there’s some sentiment from fans about it as well that is important to recognize. So it’s a difficult situation.”
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“100 percent, 100 percent, ” Truex said. “That’s correct. I think that’s what they look at. Now, the only thing I will say, baseball, football, basketball, they all play on the same court every week. They’re playing the same game. Racing is different.
“There are guys that will go to a certain track for years and will be the guys to beat and it takes awhile to figure that out. So much of it was about timing. It was good for us to go to Homestead when we went to the championship because we were good at that track. Now Joey is a three time champion and he’s good at that track. It’s the way it is.”
But Keselowski echoes the sentiment a large number of fans have too.
“You know what, we’re not the NFL,” Keselowski said. “I don’t know why we keep getting caught up in comparisons to other sports. We’re in a lot of ways better because we have all of our competitors compete against each other every week. We have incredible fan access, great partners.
“I don’t want to be the NFL. I don’t want to be hockey. I don’t want be MLB. I don’t want to be any of those sports. I want to be us, and if we can be the best us we can be, I think people will like that.”
But, right now, NASCAR and the TV partners are committed to a playoff format of some kind, even as senior league officials expresses a willingness to tweak it next year.
Keselowski says he has a ‘fondness’ for the old Latford System used from 1975 to 2003 but would just prefer the champion be whoever wins the most races each year as the champion.
“I have a hard time as a competitor and a fan of the sport understanding how drivers with most wins routinely don’t win championships,” Keselowski said. “I just don’t think that feels right to me. I would like to see, if there were any format changes, more value on race wins as a whole through the duration of the season.”
Blaney suggested a 16-driver playoff based on championship points, then two playoff rounds where the field is cut to eight on points after five races then another five-race points battle to keep it close to the end.
“I would like to see a group of races to end the year where you are not going to have anyone run away with it and you’re going to have three to five races and you’re still going to have some really good competition going on,” Blaney said. “But I’m not like a standing on the front lines wanting this playoff thing to change. It is what it is but yeah, I think there’s maybe tweaks they could think about.”
Points racing encourages the best average finish more than wins and one of the reasons a playoff was introduced was former NASCAR CEO Brian France holding a deep resentment towards drivers climbing out of their car after finishing fourth and telling reporters they were satisfied with a good points day.
At the same time, Kyle Larson and Christopher Bell won six and three races respectively this season but didn’t make it to the final four because three of the Round of 8 races were won by drivers below the elimination cutline. On one hand, that’s a clutch performance and on the other hand, that only allowed one driver to advabce on points earned through season long performance and the results of the three-race round, William Byron.
Byron outperformed Bell and Larson in that final round, albeit infamously with some help from his Chevrolet manufacturer mates, and went onto the final four.
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Bell says season long top contenders need to have a stronger buffer in the playoffs.
“They said they want the playoff system in place, which is understandable, because it creates a lot of intensity and makes every race important and I love that piece of it,” Bell said. “Maybe the points system, adjusting the points system in a way that gets the best cars into the Championship Race, would be awesome.”
Denny Hamlin echoed that sentiment, suggesting NASCAR simply pay more playoff points for each race win and for those issued to teams in the top-10 of the regular season standings each year.
“Give the guys that get 30-40 points under this system, the Bells, the Larsons, they deserve to have a really good buffer there to make it through the rounds,” Hamlin said. “We’re in a sport where you can get caught up in so many wrecks and things that can happen…
“I think what we’re trying to get to and the message we’re trying to send is make the regular season matter more, right? Those 26 races, its proving to not be that substantial to winning a championship and that’s not something you want.
“So my message to NASCAR would be make the regular season worth more, not just the championship and the points you get, because right now, the last three years you would say, the champion didn’t have to do much in the regular season and that’s not good.”
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Devils advocate again: Bell and Larson both made it to the final three-race round but clutch performances in the playoffs eliminated them. In 2023, Martin Truex Jr was the regular season champion and top-seeded and suddenly was incapable of running inside the top-10 in the playoffs and still advanced to the Round of 8 purely as a result of the buffer his regular season afforded him.
So the biggest issue with this system is that Logano, Blaney and Tyler Reddick won when it mattered the most and eliminated those who won with greater regularity in the regular season but didn’t in the playoffs.
Logano, predictably, when asked what he would change said ‘nothing,’ and not a thing.
“The only thing I would even remotely think about would be making it a two-race points race for the championship, I guess,” Logano said. “But, at the same time, I can talk myself right out of that.
“You have the big moment right there in the championship race. You have that Super Bowl feeling. Spreading that over two weeks wouldn’t be as special. But having two races would give you the opportunity to come back if something happens that’s out of your control. But I wouldn’t change a thing.”
A lot of drivers and industry people have suggested a three-race points race to close out the season too.
But in the same way that Kenseth, Johnson and Logano gamed each system, Byron says everyone will change the way they race a new system and someone would game that format too.
“You’re going to have your side effects with every change,” Byron said. “I feel like that would create new challenges or problems. When this format started with one race, winner take all, it’s been super-exciting. It’s just the format we’re in. I think there are better ways, but I feel like as drivers we shouldn’t really complain about it too much because it’s the format we’re in and we have to excel at it.”
