Imagine how much fun it would be if this Chase really did produce a winless Cup champion.
Think about that: a winless champion.
What a hoot. Think of the stir. The uproar. The national guffawing. We'd be talking abut it all winter.
NASCAR would come under the mainstream spotlight again. Not the best light, mind you, but plenty of attention.
So David Letterman has the champ on as usual, see, but as the guy takes a seat on the set, Dave says:
"So let me get this straight. You didn't win a single race this season, but you are NASCAR's 2010 champion? How does that work, for gosh sake?"
Dave knows, of course, but he just wants his audience to hear this.
In any other sport, "winless champion" is an oxymoron. Not in NASCAR. It has never happened, but it is possible.
Although it's still improbable for an oh-for-36 season to yield a Cup, it seems more possible now than ever.
And maybe it needs to happen, to expose NASCAR's championship points system for the anachronism it is. Maybe the public outcry would pressure NASCAR as never before to change radically, to do what it has never done adequately: reward winning.
Going into the Chase opener Sunday at Loudon, N.H., five of the 12 Chasers are winless this season.
The top seven are where they are because they've won, and received seeding bonuses for their wins.
But now the seeding bonuses cease, and the original intent of the NASCAR points system -- rewarding consistency -- kicks back in, full force.
So let's look for sheer consistency in how these guys are running.
Over the past 10 races, the winless Chasers have a better cumulative average finish, 10.56, than the winners, 14.57.
Ah, you say, but the winners have been getting ready for the Chase, experimenting. Well, so have the winless.
Over that period, top seed Denny Hamlin (six wins this year) has an average finish of 18.3. Second seed Jimmie Johnson (five wins) has an average of 17.0
Winless, ninth-seeded Carl Edwards has an average of 7.5.
And the four other winless drivers all have better averages than both Hamlin and Johnson: Jeff Burton 10.4, Clint Bowyer 10.9, Jeff Gordon 11.2 and Matt Kenseth 12.8.
What's that? There's no road course in the Chase, you say, and the past 10 races included one, Watkins Glen?
Well, let's go back the past 12 races and throw out the Glen and Sonoma, to include only the past 10 oval races.
That way, the winless have an average finish of 10.14, and the winners 13.99. Again, all five winless drivers averaged better than Hamlin and Johnson. Edwards in particular averaged 7.0 to Hamlin's 14.7.
Now you say it only stands to reason that the winless have been more consistent lately -- otherwise they wouldn't have made the Chase at all.
But from here on out, it's all consistency, just like in the old days before the Chase began in 2004.
Johnson's blitzing through the Chase with multiple wins in recent years has made even his competitors believe you've got to win Chase races to win the Chase.
But in 2005, the year before Johnson began his run of four straight championships, Tony Stewart entered the Chase with five wins but won nary a Chase race. Winless in the Chase, Stewart won the Cup.
Consistency.
In the inaugural Chase, in '04, Kurt Busch won only one playoff race, the opener at Loudon, but still beat Johnson, who won four of the last six, for the championship.
Consistency.
I never have liked rewarding consistent also-rans more than winners, yet here NASCAR is in the seventh year of a playoff format, and consistency is still the key.
Formula One's points system features a whopping 28 percent dropoff between winning and second place, as it should. Even IndyCar has a 20 percent dropoff, 50 to 40.
NASCAR in 2007 did give a token bump to the reward for winning, from 175 points to 185, keeping the second-place award at 170. Any winner actually gets at least 190, counting the five-point bonus for leading a lap, and up to 195 if he leads the most laps.
But 195 to 170, the widest margin between first and second possible in a race, is only a 13 percent dropoff.
Many, including me, advocate a 50-point spread between first and second for NASCAR, or a 23 percent dropoff, which is more in the ballpark with the other racing leagues.
But NASCAR has crept along, all these years, afraid to put some real action into a system originally developed largely to pressure teams to show up at tracks they otherwise wouldn't go to.
Four times in its history, NASCAR has narrowly avoided the embarrassment of a winless champion.
The first two times a one-race winner won the title -- Bill Rexford in 1950 and Ned Jarrett in '61 -- NASCAR wasn't on the national map enough for it to matter much.
The third one-win champion, Benny Parsons in 1973, was a feel-good underdog story. Parsons was so well-liked that after he crashed in the final race of the season, at Rockingham, N.C., crewmen from most of the other teams came to his aid in the garage area. They helped him patch together enough of a car to go back out and secure the title.
But after Matt Kenseth won the title with one win in 2003, the Chase system was implemented for the very next year.
With the need for rewarding winning more, and the need to put the Chasers in their own points system, separate from the others, during the playoffs … and with the fun we'd have all through offseason … well …
Here's hoping NASCAR doesn't dodge the bullet of a winless champion a fifth time.