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.
by Patrick Zier | Oct 29, 2026 |
TAMPA – Brian Hartline didn’t mince words. It was August, and he was just preparing to start his first season as South Florida’s new coach, replacing Alex Golesh, who had fled to Auburn. “They’ve had some success here the last couple of years, but nowhere near what it should be,” he told On3’s Pete Nakos.
Now Golesh, although he never won an American Conference championship (nobody has ever won a conference championship outright at USF, at least not in football, although the team has tied for a division title) was coming off a 9-3 season that included wins over nationally ranked Boise State, probably the best team in the Group of Six, and Florida in Gainesville. All of a sudden, the Bulls were relevant in the world of college football.
And when Golesh departed for Auburn, he had the second-best winning percentage of any coach in USF history with the exception of Jim Leavitt, who got the program started and had some supercharged seasons along the way, once getting the Bulls as high as No. 2 in the AP poll.
So taking a shot at Golesh, which, for all intents and purposes, is what Hartline did, puts him out on a limb. “The expectation should be to win,” he told Nakos. “The floor here should be a constant chase for the American Conference championship.”
Fast forward to now, this week, when Hartline’s Bulls return to action here against UAB, the first of five straight conference games that will, essentially, determine whether Hartline goes boom or bust. All the games are winable, but none of them are easy with a road game at FAU and a home game against perennial power Memphis looming large.
Hartline still has a path to a conference championship, but it has a lot of twists and turns along the way and USF’s first seven games, which produced a 5-2 record and were, for the most part, uninspiring have done little to instill confidence.
Furthermore, USF has two teams, UTSA and North Texas, above it with no conference losses and four with only one, and UTSA has already beaten the Bulls. So at this point, contending for a title with two conference losses seems to be a ‘What are you smoking?’ kind of thing.
Taking the next step, starting to muscle his way to prominence in the American, Group of Six and beyond, may be more than this team can handle right now. By the end of the season, Golesh’s 9-3 might look pretty good. None of this really bothers Hartline, who continues going about his business and doing his thing, confident the results will come.
“I think to take the next step requires more than, you know, having a successful first year,” Hartline commented. “Like if we go 12-0 in this year I wouldn’t say we took the next step,” Hartline said. “I think taking the next step is, you know, the results matching the expectation. I think the next step is developing something you can sustain over time.
“It’s not a, you know, flash or bust kind of thing,” Hartline remarked. “So I don’t think you can really identify that (when you’ve taken the next step) without consistency over time. But, I mean, obviously, if we want to get where we want to go, we’d love to maximize that first year. And I’m not minimizing that in any way. But I don’t think either way it’s going to be like you check that box.”
Getting to 10 wins, which has only happened twice before in USF history, would be a significant achievement for Hartline given what he has left in front of him. For that to happen, the offense, ranked 84th nationally and eighth in the conference in scoring and 124th in the nation and 13th in the conference in total offense, will have to take a giant leap forward.
And while the defense has been very good, ranking 10th nationally and first in the conference against scoring, it has had a tendency to break down at some inopportune times. “If we take care of business we can still achieve our goals,” Hartline said. “The reality is we’ve got to do a better job.
“In our opinion, we own our own destiny,” Hartline continued. “So, you know, a lot of teams that we’re going to see are above us in the conference, and we have an opportunity to change that. It comes down to getting better each week, like we’ve been saying for the last seven weeks. If we haven’t gotten better, we’re never going to be ready for week seven, week eight, week nine,” Hartline declared.
It definitely won’t be easy. UAB. East Carolina. Memphis. FAU. Tulane. Ready or not, here they come.
by Patrick Zier | Oct 25, 2026 |
While attention centers on the championship chase in Sunday’s Yellawood 500 at Talledega, and which members of NASCAR’s “Big Three,” Hendrick, Gibbs and Penske, will survive and remain viable title contenders in the remaining two races, there is another “Big Three” that are working their way up and should have a major impact on the sport in future years.
They are Carson Hocevar, 23; Connor Zilsch, 21; and Corey Heim, 24. Capsulizing their performances this season, Hocevar gets the headlines, Zilsch gets the ride, and Heim gets it done.
After limited success in trucks, Hocevar was signed by Spire Motorsports, a second tier Chevy team, in 2024. And he did nothing to distinguish himself until this year, when he won the Talladega spring race and gained national attention for his burnout.
He continued to gain fan support with his aggressive tactics on the track, frequently knocking competitors out of the way to improve his position at times when it really didn’t matter in terms of the outcome of the race, then belligerently defending his moves when other drivers called him out afterwards.
His fan base loved it, making a false comparison to Dale Earnhardt, and he rapidly became one of the most popular drivers in the sport despite his inability to run up front after Talladega. Unlike Hocevar, Earnhardt competed consistently for wins and when he knocked somebody out of the way, there was usually a reason for it.,
Zilsch’s situation is more complicated. He had an impressive season with JR Motorsports in 2025, wining 10 races in the Xfinity Series including 18 top fives in a row, a series record, which earned him a promotion to Trackhouse Racing, another tier two Chevy team.
But probably in part because Trackhouse’s cars are absolutely awful, Zilsch has done absolutely nothing this year, scoring just five points on the Old Guy Sport competition index. Only Shane van Gisbergen, perhaps the best road racer in NASCAR history, has been able to win at Trackhouse. Yet despite that, Rick Hendrick recently signed Zilsch to replace Alex Bowman in 2028.
Then there’s Heim. He was the 2025 truck champion, winning 12 races, and is driving parttime for Toyota’s 23XI team, where he will be fulltime next year, replacing Riley Herbst. Driving just 13 races, Heim won twice in his first 12 starts, taking the road race at San Diego and then the Indy Brickyard 400, one of NASCAR’s most prestigious events. The last time that happened in NASCAR was 1965, when some guy named A.J. Foyt pulled it off.
And if you compare the records of the three, Heim stands out although it should he noted he is the only one of the three in a winning car and in NASCAR now, if you don’t have a car that can win you won’t win. The car has become more important than the driver. In 12 races so far, Heim has two wins, three top fives and four top 10s. In 33 races, Hocevar has done well with one win, six top fives and 11 top 10s while Zilsch has no wins, no top fives and one top 10, also in 33 races.
After his Brickyard win, Heim was quoted on NASCAR’s website as saying success in trucks doesn’t guarantee success in Cup. “The competition in this series is kind of like no other,” Heim said. “But the fact that we’ve kind of had everything line up really well as far as the speed in these Toyotas and 23XI specifically has been surreal.
“To be part of this program when they’ve hit their peak, and hopefully we can keep it there for as long as I’m with them, they’ve definitely been riding high this year. I feel fortunate to be able to be a part of that.”
Steve Lauletta, president of 23XI, said that the team and Heim’s success are proof that “the processes we put in place are working. It shows that the people at 23XI are really special. They continue to surprise me and amaze me with what we’ve been able to accomplish in a short period of time.”
Heim feels one of the reasons he’s had so much success so early in his career is because unlike a lot of young drivers, he didn’t jump right from a feeder series to a fulltime Cup ride. “I think a little bit of it is just running the part-time schedule, being able to sort of have gaps between each race,” Heim said.
“I feel it’s pretty rare that someone gets to run a bridge year and then go full time to Cup. A lot of guys go straight from O’Reilly or trucks to Cup without a lot of experience,” Heim said.
Of course Heim’s rapid rise is leading to high expectations for next year. “I think the outside expectations will probably be higher than they would be if I didn’t win,” Heim said. “I don’t know. I feel like I’m pretty good at just focusing on myself and the task at hand, not getting caught up in what other people say or think, just making sure I do my job and execute as I should.
“I try my best to not let the outside noise or expectations affect what I do on the racetrack,” Heim commented. “I’m going to try and keep doing that as I progress through my rookie season.”
NASCAR NOTES
No race this week. Old Guy Sport does not count superspeedway races in its standings because too much luck is involved in running well. You have to avoid the “big wreck,” which can happen anytime and which you can’t prepare for in advance because you don’t know when it will happen, and you have to be in the right lane at the right time coming out of the fourth turn on the last lap and that is totally dependent on what the cars around you decide to do.
OGS competition index after 28 races: 1-Denny Hamlin 621 points, 2-Christopher Bell 558, 3-Kyle Larson 541, 4-Chase Briscoe 477, 5-Tyler Reddick 466, 6-Ryan Blaney 419, 7-Ty Gibbs 354, 8-Joey Logano 319, 9-Shane van Gisbergen 226, 1-Chase Elliott 222.
