In my 21 years of life on this planet, something I have been born into is being a NASCAR fan.
My dad was a Jeff Gordon fan growing up and I was inducted into being a Jeff Gordon fan. NASCAR is a fun sport to watch, but there is a glaring issue that makes it hard to be a NASCAR fan. That issue is the NASCAR playoffs system. I’m going to say it, the playoffs need to go; it ruins the integrity of the sport.
NASCAR introduced a postseason called “The Chase” in the 2004 season, which was a 10-race shootout between the top 12 drivers in points. It came after Matt Kenseth had a championship season the year before in 2003 with just one win, but with a lot of consistency, which is what got Kenseth the title.
NASCAR invented “The Chase” so champions will no longer have Kenseth-like seasons to win a championship and need to get “wins” to earn it. After a couple of tweaks, NASCAR reinvented “The Chase” and turned it into a three-race/four-round playoff elimination system where you could simply lock yourself into the chase and the next round starting with the 2014 season. Only this time expanding the field from 12 to 16.
Even better, the last race is its own championship race that involves the last four standing in the playoffs. It was made to invent parity while still trying to create drama.
This is all so that NASCAR avoids seasons where the champion is crowned with a few races left to go, like how most other forms of motorsports do with a full season. Essentially, as it’s stated throughout the sport, NASCAR wants a manufactured game-seven moment.
From the start, the playoffs have been a disaster for the integrity of the sport. In 2014, Jeff Gordon was arguably the best driver that year. He had four wins with a plethora of top 5s and top 10s. And in the round of eight (the semifinal round), he had two second-place finishes but got eliminated because he was wrecked from the lead in one of the races.
Then in 2020, Kevin Harvick, who had nine wins, didn’t get a chance to compete for the title because of a bad round of eight. Last season, the champion Joey Logano was eliminated in the round of 12, but got new life because one of the drivers who originally advanced in the round of 12 cutoff race got disqualified. Logano won the opener in the round of eight to advance to the championship race and ended up winning the championship despite finishing a full season in 14th place.
Only three times in the playoff’s 10-year history has the champion been the driver who has scored the most points in a season (Martin Truex Jr, 2017, Kyle Busch, 2019 and Kyle Larson, 2021).
NASCAR media and playoff believers will point out how the best team all year doesn’t always win the Super Bowl or the World Series.
Sure, that is true, but in stick and ball sports, the Wild Cards have to be good enough to earn their way into the playoffs alone. In NASCAR, all you need to do is win just one race and you’re competing for a title. It doesn’t matter how good you were; it doesn’t matter where you finished in all other races. That one win is all that matters.
That fact is not right if you were a driver who truly was on it all year. All your hard work can be outdone by a single bad block from a driver that is not in the chase and someone who has been struggling all year could steal a spot in the playoffs from you. In this sport, it is mathematically possible to win 35 of the 36 races, but in race 36 (the championship race) you get wrecked by a lapped car and you don’t win the championship.
NASCAR wants the playoffs so they also avoid seasons like what IndyCar had this season, where Alex Palou dominated the entire season, or in F1 when Max Verstappen had a historic 2023 season, winning all but three of the races.
Drama is fun when it’s natural and not forced. It’s what made F1’s 2021 championship battle between Verstappen and Lewis Hamilton so great because I don’t know the next time we will see one as tight as that again.
After the 2025 Championship weekend came and gone, it brought only more controversy in the sport. Corey Heim who had a dominating season in the NASCAR Truck Series level survived to win that race and the championship. But in the Xfinity Series, Connor Zillich, who won 10 races and had 20 top five’s finished third and second in the title chase so his historic season was for nothing.
Then to wrap it up in the Cup series, the guy who finished first in full season points in Larson ended up winning but even that felt awful. Because Denny Hamlin dominated the race and was three laps away from claiming his elusive first championship, that was until a caution came out to cause what is NASCAR overtime where they add two more laps until the field finishes the race. Larson, who was struggling all day, gambled on pit road and took only two tires and got ahead of Hamlin and ended up winning the title. It was controversial because it basically said that a whole championship in a 36 race season can come down to an additional unscheduled two laps.
In NASCAR, it’s a guarantee that four drivers will be competing for the title, but it just doesn’t feel as exciting. It is important to note that NASCAR is considering making changes to the playoffs, so NASCAR, all I will say is make the right call and bring back the old full-season points format.
