by Patrick Zier | Mar 15, 2025 |
We could talk about tires, but when it comes to NASCAR, you can talk about tires every week because they’re one of the most important variables in any given race. And that’s especially true now that NASCAR has added an option tire to the mix, a softer compound that gives you a lot of get up and go for a short amount of time. It’s kind of a gimmick really, kind of like using two different footballs in an NFL game. But enough of that.
NASCAR is in Las Vegas this weekend, and the biggest question is whether or not Christopher Bell, who is really on a roll, can win his fourth straight race. Bell has won on a superspeedway, a road course and a short track and if he can conquer Las Vegas’ intermediate sized oval, he will have accomplished something that’s never been done before – winning four in a row on four different kinds of tracks.
Bell and his Joe Gibbs Racing team are really humming, and he gives a lot of credit to the guys and the guys give a lot of credit to him, which is one of the reasons they’re having a lot of success.
“What you are seeing is everybody pulling the rope in the same direction,” Bell said after his win at Phoenix last Sunday. “Everybody’s doing their job to the best of their abilities,” he continued. “This is what I knew would come out of this team.
“It came from Adam (crew chief Adam Stevens)” Bell went on. “I didn’t know what this team was capable of but Adam knew what this team was capable of. We’re finally able to see the fruit of it. I’m just a small part of it. The last couple years we’ve been close, everyone on our team could feel it.
“We could feel it, but it was just like fighting against the current. Something would not work and take us out of contention. But we were close,” Bell said. “This team is working together right now and that’s what it’s all about. it’s not about me, it’s about everybody on our team. I haven’t changed as a driver. I’m the same driver I was back in 2021.”
Well, maybe not. “I think what you see, if you look back, is he’s (Bell) extremely good everywhere we go,” Stevens commented. “But the short tracks, he’s got a little bit of something extra. I think he’s good at micromanaging his line and finding that little bit of grip and willing to move around and change things.
“He has the ability to adapt, I’m saying adapt lap to lap and adapt as the race goes,” Stevens said. “If we see something with another team’s driving style, we an relay it to him and he can instantly duplicate it.
“These short tracks have a way of changing quite a bit. You saw the groove move around as the tires age. He’s just got so much talent that eventually I think all the tracks are going to look like that to him, that he can just do it anywhere we go,” Stevens concluded.
NASCAR NOTES:
Three most likely winners at Las Vegas: 1-Tyler Reddick, 2-Kyle Larson, 3-Dave Blaney. Last year’s winners at Las Vegas: First race, Larson. Second race, Reddick. Top five finishers at Phoenix last week: 1-Bell, 2-Denny Hamlin, 3-Larson, 4-Josh Berry, 5-Chris Buescher. Old Guy Sport’s Phoenix picks: 1-Larson, 2-Blaney, 3-Hamlin. Bell wins race, OGS 1-1 for the season. Top 10 in OGS Competition Index: 1-Bell 114 points, 2-William Byron 51, 3-Hamlin 40, 4-Reddick 35, 5-Larson 30, 6-Kyle Busch 28, 7-Chase Elliott 20, 8-Joey Logano 12, 9-Shane van Gisbergen 11, 10-Chris Buescher 10. OGS top 10 on short tracks: 1-Bell 60, 2-Hamlin 40, 3-Larson 30, 4-Logano 12, 5-Byron 11, 6-Buescher 10, 7-Ryan Preece 5, 8-Austin Cindric 1.
by Patrick Zier | Mar 14, 2025 |
Florida’s Billy Napier has been on the hot seat so long he’s probably wearing asbestos pants. After two so-so seasons where his teams battled to reach the .500 mark, Napier needed to make something happen in 2024 to save his job, and when he got off to an unimpressive 4-5 start, everybody figured he was gone.
Then, with the clock ticking and time running out and Florida getting ready to give Napier his final paycheck, the Gators began to turn it around. First, they beat LSU, ranked No. 21 in the country, 27-16. That made them 5-5. Then they beat Ole Miss, ranked No. 9 in the country, 24-17. That made them 6-5. Then they beat arch-rival FSU, 31-11. That made them 7-5 and got them in the Gasparilla Bowl, where the beat Tulane, 33-8. If you’re keeping track, that made them 8-5 for the season.
Now nobody in Gainesville gives you a parade for finishing 8-5, but enough people who mattered decided that instead of pushing Napier out the door and, sigh, starting over again and maybe going through the same stuff again they’d give Napier one more shot to get the Gators where they’re supposed to be. And at Florida, that means contending for the SEC championship and a spot in the playoffs.
And, with spring practice underway, Napier knows that. Another Gasparilla Bowl (he’s been to two) won’t cut it. This year, Florida not only needs to play well against the SEC’s big boys, it needs to beat them, or almost all of them anyway.
And Florida – and Napier – have a shot to pull that off. With a slew of starters back on both offense and defense including a difference maker at quarterback, 6-foot-3. 241-pound super soph J.D. Lagway; Jaden Baugh, another soph who was the team’s leading rusher a year ago; up-and-coming linebacker Miles Graham, yet another soph and Bryce Lovett, a versatile offensive lineman who can play every position up front (he’s a soph, too), Florida has a promising mix of talent provided Napier can put it all together.
Almost everybody on this team was either recruited or brought in by Napier, so these are his guys. Now, it’s up to him to get the most out of them because there will be no second chance, at least not for Napier. He needs to get his system in place and the right people in the right spots.
While attention will be focused on Lagway and names like All-American center Jack Slaughter, the leader of a veteran offensive line and one of the best players in the country, others are ready to make a contribution,
most notably Lakeland high’s Cormani McClain. Coming out of Lakeland High School, McClain was not only regarded as the best defensive back in the country but, according to some recruiting services, the best player, period. He ended up at Colorado playing for Deion Sanders and almost immediately, the two clashed. McClain had all the talent in the world, but he never bought in to Sanders’ system.
So he left and ended up at Florida last year as a walk-on. Seeking to avoid what happened at Colorado, Napier put him on a short lease. McClain put his head down, walked the line and came to camp this year with a new attitude. He has impressed in early drills and could wind up being a very important piece of the Gator defense.
“Spring practice presents on opportunity to really teach not only conceptually what we do on offense, defense, and special teams but fundamentally it’s a chance to start from scratch,” Napier said before camp opened. “It creates an opportunity to develop leadership, new roles on the team.
“We certainly have high expectations here and in no way are we satisfied with where we’re at,” the Gator coach went on. You’re always sorting through the narratives,” Napier continued. “The big message for our team, the way I’ve phrased it, is we’re not worried about yesterday, we’re not worried about tomorrow.
“Our entire focus is on today. There’s always a lot of noise on the back end and there’s always a lot of hype on the front end. We’ve got to live in the middle where the work gets done,” Napier declared. “We have to remain process oriented and just see continued improvement, try to break up our year into phases, small chunks of time with objectives and goals and work our tails off one day at a time.”
That, Napier believes, will get the Gators where they want to go. It’s a big step up from last year, but Florida and Napier don’t have a choice. You’re either at the top or you’re not, and after three years of frustration, the Gators and Napier need to make a move. Napier has swung and missed three times, but he fouled the ball off last year. He can’t swing and miss again.
by Patrick Zier | Mar 7, 2025 |
Maybe it was a sign. That’s not going to mean much to Kyle Busch, who wasn’t able to hold off Christopher Bell at the end of last Sunday’s race at Austin’s Circuit of the Americas and lost for the 60th straight time, but it might mean something for Richard Childress Racing (RCR), the team Busch drives for.
Despite the losing streak, Busch is still one of NASCAR’s most talented drivers. But he is pushing 40 and RCR isn’t the dominating team it once was. And given RCR’s downward slide since the Next-Gen car was introduced in 2022, for example it didn’t score a single point on road courses a year ago according to the OldGUySport Competition Index, the future didn’t look all that bright. Not for Busch, who really has no place better to go even though his contract with RCR expires after this season, and not for RCR itself, which seemed to have dug a hole it couldn’t get out of.
Except…did we mention that RCR didn’t score a single point on road courses a year ago? Yes, we did. But what we didn’t mention was that Busch, while he didn’t win, came in fifth and led much of the race, battling race winner Christopher Bell right to the end until his tires gave out and notching 28 points on the OLdGuySport Competition Index. When you consider that Busch only scored 99 points over the entire 2024 season, that’s quite a feat.
One race does not a season make, especially on a road course, and we will have to see what happens starting this Sunday at Phoenix, the first short track race of the year, and then the next week at Las Vegas, the first intermediate track NASCAR will run on. But it’s possible – we need to be careful here because we don’t have a big enough sample size yet to be more definitive – but it is possible that RCR has found something in the Next-Gen car that will make it more competitive in 2025; a different setup maybe, a better way to manage tire wear, something.
Busch will always have a chance to break his losing streak on a super speedway, because anybody can win at Daytona, Talladega and Atlanta, but if RCR demonstrates it can run as well on short tracks and intermediate ovals as it did on the COTA road course, the odds of Busch getting a win or two go up considerably. And if Busch does win someplace other than a super speedway, the odds on RCR gaining new respect in the garage take a giant leap as well.
NASCAR NOTES
Three most likely winners at Phoenix: 1-Kyle Larson, 2-Ryan Blaney, 3-Denny Hamlin. Last year’s winners at Phoenix: First race: Christopher Bell. Second race: Joey Logano. Top five at COTA last week: 1-Bell, 2-William Byron, 3-Tyler Reddick, 4-Bill Elliott, 5-Kyle Busch. OldGuySport’s COTA picks: 1-Bell, 2-Byron, 3-Larson. Bell wins, OGS 1-0 for season. Top 10 in OldGuySport Competition Index after one race: 1-Bell, 54 points; 2-Byron 40, 3-Reddick 35, 4-Busch 28, 5-Elliott 20, 6-Shane van Gisbergen 11, T7-Bubba Wallace 2, Ryan Preece 2. (only eight drivers scored points in the first race.) Top 10 on road courses: Same.
by Patrick Zier | Mar 4, 2025 |
Todd Golden knew he had a good team. The Florida coach didn’t know how good it would be, but he knew he had a good team.
“I think we’re really mature. I think we play really hard and I think we’re really unselfish,” he said before the season on Florida’s athletic website. “Those three things specifically are kind of our identity. People who have been in our gym see the level of competitiveness on a day-to-day basis. I think we are really consistent that way,” Golden added.
“We have a lot of work to do,” he continued, “but the bones of our foundation are strong. We shoot the ball well. We’re athletic. We run well. We play hard. At the end of the day, as long as our guys compete, I’ll be OK and live with whatever happens,” Golden declared.
Going into the final week of the regular season, and with two games left to play, Golden’s Gators are gunning for a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. Florida is 25-4, 12-4 in conference play, and has a key matchup in Tuscaloosa Wednesday against Alabama, the nation’s seventh-ranked team. The Gators, by the way, are ranked No. 5. They then close the season against Ole Miss in Gainesville before competing in the SEC tournament.
The emergence of the Gators as one of the best in college basketball is truly amazing, and has established Golden as one of the bright young coaches in the game. Now in his third year at the helm, Golden has resurrected Florida .
In his first year, 2022-23, Golden got his feet on the ground and posted a 16-17 record. But he was 9-9 in the SEC and got to the NIT, where the Gators lost to another state school, Central Florida.
Then last year the program turned around, giving Golden a sense that the team was on the way up. Florida rebounded to 24-12, was 11-7 in the SEC and made the NCAA tournament, where it lost, 102-100, to Colorado in the first round. It was Florida’s best record in seven years, and it indicated But the stage was set for the Gators to elbow their way back onto the national scene, a place they hadn’t been since the Billy Donovan era, which was highlighted by Florida’s two straight NCAA championships in 2006 and 2007.
The SEC has long been known for its prowess in football, and it has taken a while for basketball to gain a legitimate foothold in the conference, but the league has come a long way since the Adolph Rupp era at Kentucky, when the Wildcats, a perennial national power, ruled along with Tennessee and Vanderbilt.
Once, after one of his nationally ranked Kentucky teams had been shocked by Florida in its cracker box gym, a frustrated Rupp said he’d burn the place down if he had a match, “except it isn’t worth the price of a box of matches.”
Back then, basketball was an after thought, played in gyms that were little better then the high school facilities most of the players were used to. Basketball was primarily a diversion to pass time between the end of football in the fall and the start of football in the spring.
No more. In recent years, SEC basketball has exploded, with new coliseums replacing the roll-our bleachers and top end talent from all over the country filling the rosters. Old, venerable conferences like the ACC and Big East are giving way to the new-look SEC, which has eight – count ’em, eight – teams in the most recent AP top 25 including No. 1 Auburn and three of the top five.
And right there in the middle of all this, mixing it up with the best of them, are Golden’s Gators. How good are they? Well, like Golden said before the season started, he knew he had a good team, he just wasn’t sure how good it was. And that still applies. Florida has beaten Auburn and lost to Georgia, which is mediocre at best.
But this team has the potential to beat anyone. Florida appears to have fixed it’s defense, it’s biggest problem a year ago when it scored 85.6 points a game but allowed 79.2. That’s down to 67.2 now and the renewed emphasis on defense hasn’t hurt the offense a bit with the Gators averaging 83.2 points per contest.
The offense is driven by one of the best point guards in the country, Polk County’s Walter Clayton. Clayton played for Bartow and then went to Iona before transferring to Florida. He’s Florida’s leading scorer, averaging 16.9 points per game, and has 113 assists.
The defensive turnaround has been led by 6-foot-10, 255-pound Reuben Chinyelu, a transfer from Washington State who has given the Gators a dominating presence at the rim, especially when combined with 6-foot-11, 230-pound Alex Condon. Condon had 45 blocked shots last year and was named to the SEC’s all-freshman team.
So right now, it’s all good for the Gators. They must get past Alabama and then Ole Miss and rise to the occasion in the SEC tournament, and that’s a tall order, but if they can pull it off, a No.1 seed in the NCAA tourney is likely theirs.
And even if they don’t wind up with a top seed, they still have the talent to contend for the championship. Even Adolph Rupp would have to admit that.
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by Patrick Zier | Feb 28, 2025 |
Connor Zilisch is only 18 years old. He’s never run a single Cup race in his life (that changes Sunday when he competes in the Echopark Automotive Grand Prix at Circuit of the Americas) but already, he’s casting a big shadow over Justin Marks’ Trackhouse racing team.
Zilisch is the new hot young talent in NASCAR, and boy is he young and boy is he talented. If Zilisch can get around the track as fast as he’s climbed the ranks in NASCAR, nobody will catch him. He’s already won the 24 Hours of Daytona and the 12 Hours of Sebring and stopped for a moment to run four races in NASCAR’s Xfinity Series last year, winning at Watkins Glen and adding a pair of fourth place finishes in two of the other three.
So, no matter what he does Sunday – and some see him as a contender in his first race – Zilisch is here to stay. He’ll only make a brief foray into Cup this year, honing his skills at a lower level for most of the season, but he’ll be back.
Which means Daniel Suarez might not be. Suarez, never a golden boy but kind of a bright light pushed to the front with his Latino heritage and NASCAR trying to expand into new markets outside the United States, has faltered, and badly.
In fact the whole Trackhouse team has struggled with the Next-Gen car. The OldGuySport point system reflects this with Trackhouse compiling 579 points in 2022, 442 in 2023 and just 250 in 2024. On road courses, team leader Ross Chastain and Suarez each had a win in 2022 but there have been none since then and Suarez, who grew up on road courses, has been particularly brutal.
In 2022, he compiled 102 points, was competitive in four of the six road course races and had the win at Sonoma. In 2023, he dipped to 31 points, all accumulated in one race, and in 2024 he didn’t score a single point. Suarez had his contract extended after last year, but it was just for the 2025 season and if he doesn’t up his game considerably, he could be out the door with Jilisch waiting in the wings.
While anything’s possible and we have nothing to go on this year this being the first real race of the NASCAR season, it doesn’t appear realistic to expect a Trackhouse driver to win on Sunday although veteran New Zealand road racer Shane van Gisbergen, who won the Chicago street race in his first ever NASCAR start in 2023, is now running full time for Trackhouse and is probably a better pick than Zilisch.
Still, the road courses – and just about every other discipline as well – were dominated by the Hendrick drivers in 2024 and with no major changes in the Cup car this year, you would have to expect Hendrick and Joe Gibbs Racing, the other 500 pound gorilla in NASCAR, to set the pace again.
Last year, Hendrick drivers won four of the five road course races and captured eight, or about 33%, of the top five finishes. At COTA, William Byron got the win. But the Toyotas made some noise, particularly Christopher Bell. Bell finished second to Byron at COTA and had 100 points on road courses according to the OldGuySport Competition Index.
He was competitive in three races and his 100 points put him third behind Kyle Larson, 134 points, and Byron, who had 111. Tyler Reddick, the lead driver for Toyota’s Team 23XI, didn’t score a lot of points but was competitive in four of the five road course races, more than any other driver. He should be considered a threat to break through this year.
So, looking ahead to Sunday, and taking into consideration the fact that Larson did not run well at COTA last year and Bell came on strong to edge Byron for second place in the final road race of the year at Charlotte, the top three picks for this race are: 1-Bell, 2-Byron and 3-Larson.
