Enough Is Enough Full Season Championship.

Hotrod said:
I was a young kid and can remember the season champion being wrapped up
with 2 or 3 races to go. Thats when I quit watching for the year. I seem to recall
some of the teams using the rest of the season to test for next year.

I like game 7's. Entertainment value is higher.
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When they pay more for every higher position in the points and the owners championship these days. It's doubtful.
 
StandOnIt said:
When they pay more for every higher position in the points and the owners championship these days. It's doubtful.
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Its NASCAR' sandbox. Fans /sportswriters who bitch and moan really wont move the needle.
It would take 1/2 of the field not showing up for a weekend to even get NASCAR's attn.
That ain't gonna happen. Drivers tried once a boycott way back in the mid 60's. Heres its
recap of that : https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/12...ory-of-the-1969-talladega-500-driver-boycott/
 
I think what’s lost in the push for ‘Game 7 moments’ is that you can’t force a Game 7. I mean, we just went almost five full years without a single championship series Game 7 in the three major sports that utilize multi-game series, from World Series 2019 to this year’s Stanley Cup Final. Sometimes it’s even a sweep, and you just gotta deal with that like you would a driver clinching the title with a race or two remaining.

The 10-race Chase was more akin to a best-of-7 series. They both build upon each race/game, letting narratives and rivalries develop over the course of multiple events, culminating in a way that multiple resets don’t really make for…which circles back to my earlier point that there isn’t really anything this format does exceptionally well.
 
One thing most important to sporting events is not knowing the outcome and
the element of surprise which makes the event more entertaining. We never know who
the champion will be till the race is over on the last race. Thats what the format does exceptionally well
and is pretty cool to me. It guarantees us a similar '92 Nov. Atl. race finish that had Elliott and Kulwicki going at it after
Allison dropped out. It was insane, I was there. NASCAR bottled that up with the current playoff
config. I understand its not a format that makes some fans happy. I am sure there are a few drivers that hate it.
I dont think I have ever missed watching a game 7 in any sport that has them, same goes for the last
race of the NASCAR season. It's must see tv and that's what NASCAR likes. Its tough to get viewers
these days with how much sporting content is available to watch in person or on stream.
 
Hotrod said:
One thing most important to sporting events is not knowing the outcome and
the element of surprise which makes the event more entertaining. We never know who
the champion will be till the race is over on the last race. Thats what the format does exceptionally well
and is pretty cool to me. It guarantees us a similar '92 Nov. Atl. race finish that had Elliott and Kulwicki going at it after
Allison dropped out.
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That was all setup by Davey winning the week before, while Elliott suffered mechanical issues that allowed Kulwicki to surge into the championship lead. That was pretty much the same formula NASCAR had re-created with the Chase, and I struggle to think of much that’s come close since elimination playoffs. It’s created some fun moments for sure, but overall I think it lacks in re-creating that story, and as a result, the final chapter often isn’t that interesting.
 
Hotrod said:
One thing most important to sporting events is not knowing the outcome and
the element of surprise which makes the event more entertaining. We never know who
the champion will be till the race is over on the last race. Thats what the format does exceptionally well
and is pretty cool to me. It guarantees us a similar '92 Nov. Atl. race finish that had Elliott and Kulwicki going at it after
Allison dropped out. It was insane, I was there. NASCAR bottled that up with the current playoff
config. I understand its not a format that makes some fans happy. I am sure there are a few drivers that hate it.
I dont think I have ever missed watching a game 7 in any sport that has them, same goes for the last
race of the NASCAR season. It's must see tv and that's what NASCAR likes. Its tough to get viewers
these days with how much sporting content is available to watch in person or on stream.
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So you are all in on a driver who wasn't the best car all year winning the championship, because you have a 3 out of 4 chance of that happening with the last race lottery with this current mess.
 
Hotrod said:
One thing most important to sporting events is not knowing the outcome and
the element of surprise which makes the event more entertaining. We never know who
the champion will be till the race is over on the last race. Thats what the format does exceptionally well
and is pretty cool to me. It guarantees us a similar '92 Nov. Atl. race finish that had Elliott and Kulwicki going at it after
Allison dropped out. It was insane, I was there. NASCAR bottled that up with the current playoff
config. I understand its not a format that makes some fans happy. I am sure there are a few drivers that hate it.
I dont think I have ever missed watching a game 7 in any sport that has them, same goes for the last
race of the NASCAR season. It's must see tv and that's what NASCAR likes. Its tough to get viewers
these days with how much sporting content is available to watch in person or on stream.
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A few drivers hate it lol. I posted an anonymous survey by Bob Pockrass of the 16 that are in the thing this year. The majority, 8 said they didn't like it. Pockrass didn't survey any of the drivers that weren't in the 16.
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StandOnIt said:
So you are all in on a driver who wasn't the best car all year winning the championship, because you have a 3 out of 4 chance of that happening with the last race lottery with this current mess.
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Yep, all in. I know there will be interest and intrigue at the end of every season and
no more walking away from the sport with 2 or 3 races to go. All drivers play by the same
rules and in some cases possible penalties. They all have a chance at grabbing a wildcard
if they re good or lucky enough. At some of these races, you need a lot of luck. Ask Bubba.
 
Also, I’d say the parity with the Gen 7 is such that if you did have a full season championship, it would be that much harder for anyone to clinch with multiple races remaining anyways.
 
StandOnIt said:
A few drivers hate it lol. I posted an anonymous survey by Bob Pockrass of the 16 that are in the thing this year. The majority, 8 said they didn't like it. Pockrass didn't survey any of the drivers that weren't in the 16.
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I actually like the suggestion of eliminating half of the 16, halfway thru the final 10 races. Simple, fair, logical, and still provides plenty of drama.
 
2 Sweet said:
I actually like the suggestion of eliminating half of the 16, halfway thru the final 10 races. Simple, fair, logical, and still provides plenty of drama.
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No doubt there are tons of variances that are better then what they have now. I don't think they can make it any more complicated than what they have now. After all of the nonsense, they still don't crown the champion properly.
 
I don't like any of them that shut off the field and keep them from advancing. Because just like individual races at the end of the race. The effort ramps up for some teams at the end of the season. Some teams can get hot. Yeah they aren't going to win the whole thing, but some teams can get a win and maybe a couple of top 5's. 17th is as high as they can get at present.
 
I can see elements in both sides of this. The points champion SHOULD include all races (don’t cut it off before the playoffs) and the Playoffs should be limited to those in the top 20. We are having this conversation primarily because we had three stacked weeks of back of the pack freak wins and essentially no control since they lifted the rank restrictions. We do want all the better cars to race fully right till the end. Cody Ware is never going to be one of those (as an example). But people still like a dark horse winner.

IMHO the way to get closer and better is to have the Season points winner be a feature thing that happens the week before the final championship race. Make it a bigger deal and celebrate it more. Stilll have the playoffs and spin it a bit. Call it the Premier Cup 😬. And that’s winners who rank in the top 20. Then that last race can be what it is but with a bit more sense. But points guys are still chasing points till the week before. It moves the needle in the right direction. But NASCAR needs to promote the points champion (change the name to something more exciting). Okay tldr
 
I just think that there is something special with the Championship 4. You have arguably earned a shot, and you have to move all of the chips to the center of the table. I feel like at least a part of greatness should be defined by performance in specific situation. The Regular Season gives respect to consistency which should be pat of determining a champion. The Playoffs offer a post season for those who have qualified to get that shot at it all. It may not be the perfect system, but no system is. The question is....Has this system crowned an outlandish champion? Nope....and that says something about both the system and the participants' ability to step up in a big situation.
 
aunty dive said:
^ Enjoys “professional” wrestling …

Where things happen naturally. 🤡
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Wrestling - and I say this as someone who doesn't watch it anymore (I could spend awhile on that but will spare all as it is irrelevant) - is a simulacrum of an athletic endeavor which is really a performance art. The reason why wrestling became fixed in the first place was to at some point guarantee the fans who were watching it the euphoric release of seeing the "face" (good guy) overcome the odds and beat the "heel", which is something that real professional sports, most namely boxing, couldn't guarantee. You build up the moment of the heel receiving his comeuppance at the hands of the face. By comparison to what wrestling is when it is successful, the NASCAR points' system doesn't value long term narrative story telling: it does value chaos and controversy and "moments" that could go viral.

Interestingly as a parallel, "valuing chaos, controversy, and viral moments" is actually a consistent complaint about WWE between 2001 and 2023 when Vince McMahon was finally sent packing for the last time. During that time, the WWE became increasingly insular, consumed almost all of its competitors domestically, and saw ratings and live attendance tank. Since he's been gone, the numbers have gone the opposite direction for the first time since Steve Austin was a household name and The Rock was an employee rather than a major shareholder and board member.
 
FLRacingFan said:
That was all setup by Davey winning the week before, while Elliott suffered mechanical issues that allowed Kulwicki to surge into the championship lead. That was pretty much the same formula NASCAR had re-created with the Chase, and I struggle to think of much that’s come close since elimination playoffs. It’s created some fun moments for sure, but overall I think it lacks in re-creating that story, and as a result, the final chapter often isn’t that interesting.
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You could only stitch together a narrative of the seasons where Logano won the title around Logano retrospectively and not in real time because, well, he was never the favorite to win. I know some will suggest this isn't an issue, except the entirety of sports media is built on endless recitation and exposition on narratives. I don't have to like the fact that Stephen A Smith and Pat McAfee have molded it in their image, but it is what it is. Much like how everyone else is trying to make their sports more simple to follow and shorten events, NASCAR feels like it is zigging while everyone else is zagging to me. But again, this seems to be what the existing fanbase wants, so they're giving them that. I just have to accept that!
 
StandOnIt said:
I don't like any of them that shut off the field and keep them from advancing. Because just like individual races at the end of the race. The effort ramps up for some teams at the end of the season. Some teams can get hot. Yeah they aren't going to win the whole thing, but some teams can get a win and maybe a couple of top 5's. 17th is as high as they can get at present.
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If I compare it to F1 right now - I see a lot of posts and YouTube videos and content related to McLaren finding their rhythm this season and Lando Norris maybe possibly being in the title hunt (he isn't really but you can argue it is possible) after multiple years of complete domination by Max Verstappen. There is no such narrative in NASCAR YouTube or social media beyond people arguing about the points system for the 5 millionth time after seeing Austin Dillon basically break every unwritten rule of the sport to win at Richmond. Turning a professional auto race at this level into Mario Kart on the last lap was a step too far for a lot of people in terms of buying into the legitimacy of the sport.
 
StandOnIt said:
So you are all in on a driver who wasn't the best car all year winning the championship, because you have a 3 out of 4 chance of that happening with the last race lottery with this current mess.
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If you can’t perform when it counts, you don’t deserve be a champion. Calling it a lottery is insulting to the teams who put in the effort to win the championship.
 
The Nature Boy said:
If you can’t perform when it counts, you don’t deserve be a champion.
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I always see this as a response and I think to myself, "Yes, I suppose that's true. Shame about how this statement inherently means how little anything else counts."
 
virtualbalboa said:
I always see this as a response and I think to myself, "Yes, I suppose that's true. Shame about how this statement inherently means how little anything else counts."
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Which is a fair argument. I would make the final round 3 races. Playoff points do a fairly good job of rewarding full season performance, but the finale undoes that a bit.
 
virtualbalboa said:
I always see this as a response and I think to myself, "Yes, I suppose that's true. Shame about how this statement inherently means how little anything else counts."
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The whole season of work reduced to a bad pit stop, or a flat, or a bad restart etc. seems like an insane way to award a Nascar champion. Completely ignores the rest of the season and opens up the who's lucky enough to win the thing angle.
 
StandOnIt said:
The whole season of work reduced to a bad pit stop, or a flat, or a bad restart etc. seems like an insane way to award a Nascar champion. Completely ignores the rest of the season and opens up the who's lucky enough to win the thing angle.
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Imagine you upset a driver during the season, and he walls you during the final race, and cost you a championship you should have won.
 
Blaze said:
Imagine you upset a driver during the season, and he walls you during the final race, and cost you a championship you should have won.
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There is something similar we might see this year. Wallace, Buescher and Busch might be racing hard this year and not tip toeing around the chosen few. They might rough up somebody doing it. I'm pretty sure Keselowski and Childress wouldn't have a problem with it. Jordon probably wouldn't either.
 
The Nature Boy said:
Ask Brendan Gaughan about how that works in a full season format.
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Yes, it can happen then also, anything we mentioned can. That’s why I added “should have won.” which by that I mean, where they would’ve went into the last race already having won the championship if there was no playoffs or chase, and the full 36 race season was one long battle. Not one where they would’ve had to have a bad race to lose. Slight difference between the two, because you didn’t do good enough all season, and can’t blame it on one race. Where in this format they have now, it literally would be that last race that cost you, there’s nothing different you could’ve did in the first 35 races to change that one moment in time.
 
StandOnIt said:
The whole season of work reduced to a bad pit stop, or a flat, or a bad restart etc. seems like an insane way to award a Nascar champion. Completely ignores the rest of the season and opens up the who's lucky enough to win the thing angle.
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First off, everyone I work with is out of the country or out sick today. I'm gonna be playing around with the NASCAR points because I can. Expect some long ass effort post later. Secondly: I have a hypothesis that the most efficient way to run a 4 car NASCAR team is to select 2 drivers to be your wing/offense, akin to jammers in roller derby. The other two then become goons; blockers who's job is to raise hell from green to checkered. Wall people, hook people, "rattle their cages" at every opportunity, block like crazy since there's no rules about it, whatever it takes to disrupt the flow of anyone who isn't your guy. You pick drivers who have no career if they don't do it - Corey LaJoie types - and pay them well. You can't do any of this stuff over the radio, so it has to be strategized and developed away from the track and even something like the pit crew. This way, you could set up your primary cars to perform well at short runs and have some degree of assurance that they'll get short runs leading to stage finishes or the end of the race.

Would that be entertaining? For one, maybe two seasons. Once all the teams did it, however...
 
virtualbalboa said:
First off, everyone I work with is out of the country or out sick today. I'm gonna be playing around with the NASCAR points because I can. Expect some long ass effort post later. Secondly: I have a hypothesis that the most efficient way to run a 4 car NASCAR team is to select 2 drivers to be your wing/offense, akin to jammers in roller derby. The other two then become goons; blockers who's job is to raise hell from green to checkered. Wall people, hook people, "rattle their cages" at every opportunity, block like crazy since there's no rules about it, whatever it takes to disrupt the flow of anyone who isn't your guy. You pick drivers who have no career if they don't do it - Corey LaJoie types - and pay them well. You can't do any of this stuff over the radio, so it has to be strategized and developed away from the track and even something like the pit crew. This way, you could set up your primary cars to perform well at short runs and have some degree of assurance that they'll get short runs leading to stage finishes or the end of the race.

Would that be entertaining? For one, maybe two seasons. Once all the teams did it, however...
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Believe it or not they have something like that. I think it is in England. They have cars that are reinforced, two teams compete and the object is to block the others from advancing around the track.
 
StandOnIt said:
Believe it or not they have something like that. I think it is in England. They have cars that are reinforced, two teams compete and the object is to block the others from advancing around the track.
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New Zealand. It's a dirt series that looks like midgets with a ring around them akin to a bumper car. There's banger racing (which is in Europe and the UK) too, but that just separates out the winners between those who cause the most mayhem and those who complete the most laps IIRC.
 
virtualbalboa said:
I always see this as a response and I think to myself, "Yes, I suppose that's true. Shame about how this statement inherently means how little anything else counts."
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Like the 17 and 23 finishing 11th and 12th and don't make the playoffs? Seriously, why bother putting in that kind of effort if it doesn't a damn thing?
 
Dwayne said:
Like the 17 and 23 finishing 11th and 12th and don't make the playoffs? Seriously, why bother putting in that kind of effort if it doesn't a damn thing?
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I mean like this - if I went to the MIS race this year, Tyler Reddick won. Well, Tyler Reddick was already in the chase, so it didn't do that much for him. Kyle Busch scored the second most points of any driver, and, well, it didn't matter for him either. Zane Smith had a good finish! He's still out of a ride. Larson, Bell, and Logano all crashed and it doesn't really mean anything for any of them because they were already in the chase. I can't tell you what anyone won for a purse because those are no longer published. What does it mean to win at MIS for Reddick? I dunno, aside from getting to see him give a tribute to Scott Bloomquist after.

If it were just one race of 36 that all meant the same to the title, it's less of it just being a "regular season game" among 26 others and it's an independent event that happens to be part of the larger circuit. Instead the meaning of the race is primarily going to be interpreted through the prism of the playoffs.

Alas, no effort post from me re: points because building the data set is going to take too long to get it done in an afternoon. It used to be that you could download CSV files from Racing Reference with all the detail you'd want, but NASCAR bought the site and stripped it of that functionality because, I assume, the France family thinks math is for nerds and nerds shouldn't be fans. That's a joke. Except that JC France is a cokehead. That's not a joke.
 
StandOnIt said:
There is something similar we might see this year. Wallace, Buescher and Busch might be racing hard this year and not tip toeing around the chosen few. They might rough up somebody doing it. I'm pretty sure Keselowski and Childress wouldn't have a problem with it. Jordon probably wouldn't either.
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For Legit racers their goal is to win any and every race. Any of them win this coming week in Atlanta or later in Phoenix regardless of if it’s someone else’s playoffs that’s still a purse and a trophy and a contract extension for them so they should race for it all. Bubba absolutely needs it and MJ and Denny absolutely expect him to try. Maybe not by wrecking 11 or 45 but beyond that…game on!

That being said being considered “in” the playoffs should be due to some demonstrable excellence beyond surviving the last big one at Daytona by a fluke or winning at Miami because it was called due to rain one time…it should be a mark of an excellent season. That’s why a top 20 cap should still apply. But any driver is a fool and doesn’t belong on the track if they don’t think somewhere in their head they are there to win. Just my opinion.
 
Lets go with 36 Charters who can be leased by 36 different Cities in Major Market Areas so States can have a home team to pull for. These cities will be responsible to help fund their teams and make them competitive. My State could be the " South Carolina Engines"! They could come up with a Brand and sell millions in Merchandise! What do some of you others have??? Have fun with it, lets see!
 
Spotter22 said:
Lets go with 36 Charters who can be leased by 36 different Cities in Major Market Areas so States can have a home team to pull for. These cities will be responsible to help fund their teams and make them competitive. My State could be the " South Carolina Engines"! They could come up with a Brand and sell millions in Merchandise! What do some of you others have??? Have fun with it, lets see!
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The proposed TRAC series (2003 or so) was going to assign teams to home cities. It was no coincidence that the planned homes all had SMI tracks.
 
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