by Patrick Zier | Nov 8, 2026 |
You can’t escape the irony. Last year, Denny Hamlin lost his shot at a Cup championship in the final race of the season at Phoenix when crew chief Chris Gayle opted to pit for four tires instead of two. Kyle Larson, who only took two, ended up winning the race and the championship.
Then last Sunday at Martinsville, Hamlin, needing to cut into Larson’s point lead to set himself up for a final charge at Homestead Sunday, was victimized again. Gambling that there would be a caution during the first stage of the race, Gayle elected to leave Hamlin out while others pitted. The caution never came, and Hamlin was left running on worn tires as the other contenders zoomed by him.
Hamlin, who trailed Larson by 73 points when the race started, never recovered and left Martinsville 70 back at the end of the day. Game, set, match as they say in tennis. Doesn’t matter what happens at Homestead. Hamlin can’t make that up, and he knows it.
And so Hamlin, the best driver in the sport the past two years, has no Cup championships while Larson, who has been good but not as good as Hamlin, now will have two straight. Which is why the NASCAR championship shouldn’t be decided by a playoff, but rather by how well you race over an entire season.
This isn’t football. It isn’t baseball, or the NBA. Those are entirely different animals. If you have a bad play, strike out with the bases loaded or miss 10 shots in a row, you get a chance to recover. Not in NASCAR. Make the wrong judgment call, as Gayle did last year at Phoenix and again this year at Martinsville, get penalized for going too fast on pit road, damage your car because of somebody else’s mistake, you’re done.
That said, there is no question that Larson’s team has been consistently better than everybody else during the playoff run. While the NASCAR Chase standings reflect this to some extent, the Old Guy Sport competition index, which rewards leading laps under green and top five finishes, shows just how dominant Larson is.
Since the playoff races began at Darlington, Larson has scored a whopping 258 points. Christopher Bell is next with 167 while Chase Briscoe, fourth in the NASCAR standings, has 166. Hamlin, though, has gone in the tank with just 60.
And Larson has really taken control by dominating on the intermediate tracks, NASCAR’s bread and butter and Toyota’s personal playground heading into the playoffs. Toyota won eight of the 10 intermediate races prior to the Chase, with Hamlin taking four of them, and also took 27 of the 50 top fives up for grabs, or more than half. Larson, meanwhile, had no wins and only four top fives.
But that changed beginning with Darlington. Since then, Larson has crushed Hamlin and Toyota. He has 214 points, including two wins, on intermediate tracks while Hamlin has struggled with just 56 points in the five races.
Speaking on USA TV after the race, Hamlin said his chances of putting some pressure on Larson disappeared with Gayle’s first stage call at Martinsville. “It just basically came down to stage one with us running the no-stop strategy,” Hamlin explained. “We obviously lost all our track position there and once we lost our track position it’s just hard to drive back to the front. Nobody else did.
Making things worse for Hamlin was an incident where Joey Logano got into Bell which pushed Bell into Hamlin. “We got some decent damage there,” Hamlin said.
“Obviously, we didn’t capitalize today (last Sunday) with Larson not getting any stage points and stuff like that,” Hamlin continued. “I just, the first stage was the killer for us, that set us back,” Hamlin repeated. “For us, this weekend (Martinsville) was about all or nothing.
“We had everything to gain and nothing to lose and we just didn’t gain enough to make it (catching Larson at Homestead) realistic. I feel confident I’ll be able to go there and contend,” Hamlin declared. “I’d love to get another win before the end of the year. I thought it was going to come today (last Sunday) but, you know, we’ll get one more shot at it next week.” And one more shot at a championship in 2027.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at Homestead: 1-Christopher Bell, 2-Denny Hamlin, 3-Kyle Larson. Last year’s winner at Homestead: Larson. Top five at Homestead last year: 1-Larson, 2-Alex Bowman, 3-Bubba Wallace, 4-Chase Briscoe, 5-Hamlin. (The Homestead race was not part of the Chase last year and was run early in the season.)
Last week’s Old Guy Sport picks: 1-Ryan Blaney, 2-Joey Logano, 3-Bell. Last week’s Martinsville winner: William Byron. OGS season record after 29 races, 13-16. (OGS does not counnt superspeedway races in its standings)
OGS competition index top 10 after 29 races: 1-Hamlin 625 points, 2-Bell 558, 3-Larson 541, 4-Briscoe 478, 5-Tyler Reddick 466, 6-Blaney 419, 7-Ty Gibbs 388, 8-Logano 319. 9-Chase Elliott 262, 10-Shane van Gisbergen 236.
OGS competition index top 10 on intermediate tracks (tracks most similar to Homestead): 1-Hamlin 475 points, 2-Larson 343, 3-Bell 325, 4-Briscoe 311, 5-Reddick 301, 6-Elliott 120, 7-Byron 119, 8-Blaney 111, 9-Bowman 80, 10-Austin Cindric 79.
by Patrick Zier | Nov 5, 2026 |
Florida has always had the talent. That’s never been the question. The potential is always there. Over the years, Florida has proven that when the pieces are put together right, as happened most recently with Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer, this team can deliver a gut punch that will stagger anybody. In the SEC, other teams eye Florida like a smoking volcano, knowing it can erupt at any time and treading lightly when they are around it.
The problem is that in recent years, the eruptions have been few and far between. Jon Sumrall was hired to change that, to fix it, and he genuinely believes that he can. He is not overconfident, but he has a definite view of how the pieces fit and thought they could be put back in place fairly quickly, like even this year.
There appears to have been progress, but a lack of consistency has kept Florida from grabbing the top rung, from taking its place with Georgia, Alabama, LSU, Texas and maybe a couple others who annually fight for supremacy in what is, with apologies to no one, not the Big 10 or anyone else, the best conference in college football.
So what now? The season is winding down and Florida has no more statement games on its schedule and it will not win an SEC championship. But it saw what it’s like to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the big boys. It tasted that respect when Ole Miss, then the No. 4 team in the country, came into Gainesville fresh off an extremely emotional win over LSU and staggered out of town after taking a 52-17 pounding from Florida.
And the next week, now ranked No. 8 nationally and with everybody pointing at the Gators and saying ‘watch out for those guys,’ Florida face planted at Missouri. And then it face planted again against South Carolina. The Ole Miss win was, it turned out, another brief moment of glory, something that was not sustainable.
With the Gators getting ready for Oklahoma, Sumrall reflected on all this at his weekly press conference as reported on Florida’s football website. Oklahoma is the first of the four games left to go. All are winnable but the Sooners and then Kentucky the following Saturday could be trouble, and Sumrall must get this team motivated and ready to play, or the bottom could fall out.
“Well, undefeated is clearly off the table but that has been for several weeks,” Sumrall began. “I told our team we’re 5-3 and 3-3 in the conference. I also told them we’ve got a lot left to play for. You know, we’re in a situation, as we enter November and November football, we haven’t had a winning SEC record here since 2020, I believe.
“We have a chance to do that and that’s a pretty substantial goal. It’s not like I’m comfortable just having a winning record, but we have to find ways to continue to grow as a program so that’s something to me and then look, we have to take it one day at a time,” Sumrall said. “We have 25-ish days left until the last regular season game.
“There’s a lot left to play for,” he repeated, “and I showed our team what that looks like. And to be honest with you, after you go into a game (Georgia) that’s as hyped up as last week’s was sometimes you wonder ‘man, how much gas is left in the tank emotionally?’
“It’s something I have to help them understand,” Sumrall commented. “It’s like guys, you sign up for the whole year and what does that look like? We got to finish this thing the right way. So there’s still, to me, a lot left to play for,” Sumrall said again. “And we have to have enough pride in ourselves to play hard no matter what’s out there.”
“How you finish matters,” he emphasized. “I think, as you look down this last stretch, we’ve got three conference games and a rivalry game (FSU) at the end. We need to finish strong to create some positive momentum as we go into the offseason.
“Just find a way to go 1-0 every week for the next four weeks and when you look up, who knows where you stand at that point in the chaos we’re all in in college football right now? Like if you can find your way to 9-3 at the end, man, there’s a lot of possibilities that can happen with what else is going on in the world.
“What we have to do a better job of is taking care of what’s right in front of us. I want to finish well, I want us to grow as a team and grow the program so that we can have a future here that goes ‘all right, we’re turning in the right direction and we’re about to get this thing really started,'” Sumrall said.
“I have championship expectations every day,” Sumrall went on. “We’re not there yet and that’s frustrating as hell but we’re going to get there, we are. I’m very confident of that.” Could be. But not this year.
by Patrick Zier | Oct 30, 2026 |
Okay, let’s give it up for Kyle Larson. He’s on a late season tear that, with his win at Talladega, has all but clinched the 2026 Chase championship. And with six Chevys taking the first six spots, you might think that’s a real show of force.
Except that superspeedway races are a mirage, something you think you see that isn’t really there. Winning is simply a matter of luck. Avoid the big wreck and be in the right place at the right time on the last lap and you’ve got a chance.
Now, we can throw Larson out of that equation. He’s an outlier because he’s demonstrated that he compete on other venues as well. But Chevy, not so much. The NASCAR point standings will tell you different, but they were never designed to reflect competitiveness.
Example. After the first 26 races this year, which is the last time they were compiled before being retabulated to create a separate point system for the 16 drivers in the chase, Larson ranked seventh with 724 points. And who was eighth? Well, I’m glad you asked. None other than Larson teammate Chase Elliott, who had 723 points. In other words, Elliott was running just as well as Larson.
Now if you follow NASCAR, you know that’s ridiculous. Elliott is emblematic of the crisis facing Chevy this year. He has not run well, he hasn’t been competitive since very early in the season and he appears to be getting worse, not better.
You can go through the NASCAR point standings and find all kinds of instances like this. Daniel Suarez, who drives for Spire, Chevy’s No. 2 team, has really only been competitive in one race, the spring race at Charlotte, a rain shortened event which he won. Yet Suarez is 11th in the final regular season point standings with 676 points, just 48 behind Larson.
One of the main problems with the NASCAR point system is that it is based on incremental scoring, which, after the first finisher, awards one less point per position. In other words, second place gets 35 points, third 34, etc. But this doesn’t tell you anything about how competitive the car was.
Which is why the Old Guy Sport competition index, which is based on top five finishes and leading laps under green, is a much better indicator of who is running well and who isn’t. And it shows that Chevy, despite Larson’s strong showing, is in deep trouble.
Two things are obvious from the OGS standings. One, Chevy was way behind Toyota and behind Ford early in the season, and while Ford has picked up the pace in the second part of the year, if anything, Chevy has gotten worse.
The OGS competition index reflects this.
Larson had 266 points in the first half of the season (remember, the OGS competition index does not include superspeedways) and 275 so far in the second half. Elliott had 181 the first half and 41, a drastic drop, since then. William Byron only had 76 the first half and has even fewer the second half, just 58, while Alex Bowman, who missed five races with vertigo the first half, had just 30 and has added 50 since.
Chevy was dealing with a redesigned car this year, so you expect growing pains, but despite all the attention he’s getting now, Larson’s team figured things out early on and has gotten better since then. The other three Hendrick cars, and particularly Byron and Bowman, have regressed and they were never very good to start with.
It has been said that the Chevy teams do not share technical information, that they keep things in house, but based on performance, you have to wonder if the Hendrick cars even share with each other. How can Larson be so much better than everybody else if the same resources are available to everyone?
And this is a major problem for Chevy, because unless it figures things out in the offseason, it will go into 2027 way behind the other brands, who continue to improve. Like they say, if you’re not getting better, you’re falling behind. And Chevy is falling behind; way behind.
“I would say early in the year I recognized that we weren’t where we needed to be with our car,” Larson said during his post-race press conference at Talladega as reported on NASCAR’s website. “Then you hear about all the different drivers in the sim (race simulator), them having good days, us not. I don’t do any sim.
“I kind of committed myself to, all right, let’s give the sim a chance,” Larson said. “That’s one area where I feel like it’s helped us. Then I just have more time. I just have more time to dedicate to the Cup stuff. I chose to race less this year in the sprint car stuff. I feel like I found a good balance there.”
But as NASCAR becomes more and more technical and analytical, the driver has become less important than the car he drives. Larson has proven he’s a winning driver, but if he’s not in a car that’s capable of winning it doesn’t matter. And Larson’s cars are capable of winning. The question is why the other Chevys aren’t.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at Martinsville: 1-Ryan Blaney, 2-Joey Logano, 3-Christopher Bell. Last year’s winner in second race at Martinsville: William Byron. Top five in second race at Martinsville last year: 1-Byron, 2-Blaney, 3-Chase Elliott, 4-Ross Chastain, 5-Kyle Larson.
Old Guy Sport Talladega picks: No picks. OGS does not count superspeedway races.
OGS top 10 after 28 races: 1-Denny Hamlin 621 points, 2-Bell 558, 3-Larson 541, 4-Chase Briscoe 477, 5-Tyler Reddick 466, 6-Blaney 419, 7-Ty Gibbs 354, 8-Logano 319, 9-Shane van Gisbergen 226, 10-Elliott 222.
OGS top 10 on short tracks (tracks most similar to Martinsville): 1-Blaney 301, 2-Logano 246, 3-Bell 193, 4-Gibbs 188, 5-Hamlin 146, 6-Larson 140, 7-Briscoe, Elliott 102, 9-Reddick 74, 10-Bubba Wallace 57.
