The Playoffs

Joey Logano is a good guy but he hasn’t had a good year and he doesn’t deserve to be competing for NASCAR’S Cup Series championship. Neither does his teammate, Ryan Blaney, although either of them could win it.
You can, however, make a case for Tyler Reddick and William Byron, the other two drivers left standing as we come to the end of NASAR’s convoluted playoff system. What you can’t make a case for is why, if NASCAR really wants to determine a true champion, it would even use this kind of format.
By almost any measure, the most dominant driver in NASCAR right now is Kyle Larson, yet because of this system, he has no shot at winning the title.
Old Guy Sport has it’s own way to measure competitiveness , relying on laps led under green and top five finishes, and heading into the last race at Phoenix, Larson has 680 points. That’s more than Logano, Blaney and Austin Cindric, the third member of Team Penske, have combined, and by a good margin. Combined, the three Penske drivers have 562 points.
When NASCAR put in this latest version of its playoffs, it was trying to create something similar to the NFL. That’s fine, except the NFL and NASCAR are totally different, and what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for the other.
The biggest problem is that in the NFL, teams control their own destiny. In NASCAR, they do not. If you do everything right in a football game and play better than the other guy, you will win.
But even if you do everything right in NASCAR, you can still lose. You can get caught up in a wreck not of your doing, get knocked into the wall because of somebody else’s mistake. And if that happens, you’re done.
Which brings up another handicap NASCAR drivers face that NFL players don’t. In NASCAR, you don’t get a second chance. An NFL quarterback can throw an interception in the first quarter and the winning touchdown pass in the fourth. But if something happens to you during a race, it’s over.
Still, it is what it is and one of the four – Logano, Blaney, Reddick or Byron – is going to be the champ when all is said and done. First off, let’s say none of them is likely going to win the race although Blaney has an outside shot. But Denny Hamlin, with 277 Old Guy Sport competition points on short tracks and Larson, with 275, would seem better poised to win.
The champion, then, will be the highest finisher among the four and pick here is Blaney. Blaney had a top five finish in the first race at Phoenix and, along with Byron, has done the best of the four on short tracks overall. Using the OGS competition index, Blaney has 102 short track points, Byron, 104.
But whoever wins, Blaney, Byron, Reddick or Logano, it will be a cheap championship. They may be competing against each other, and Byron and Reddick belong, but this should be about the best in NASCAR and the best in NASCAR this year are Larson, Hamlin, Christopher Bell, Reddick and Byron. No one else is even close.