The Legitimacy Debate

On Nov. 10 of last year, I watched the NASCAR Cup Series championship race from a stool in my favorite arcade bar in Little Rock.

I watched Joey Logano lead 107 laps and win the race and his third Cup Series title.

Then I watched as NASCAR social media lost its collective mind.

The reactions that night — which have continued in the year since — concerning Logano’s championship and the playoff format the sport’s had for a decade was an affront to the racing gods and people personally.

The word legitimacy became the word most commonly used in our little section of the Internet.

Of course, sitting on that stool and watching the reactions come rolling across my feed, a thought entered my mind.

“Is everyone just mad it was Logano who pulled it off?”

If someone like Chase Elliott or Tyler Reddick had done what Logano did, would we even be having this conversation?

What if Reddick had been the driver who, after having a miserable season, saved an ungodly amount of fuel and won at Nashville Superspeedway instead of finishing third?

What if it was Reddick who was eliminated from the playoffs after the race at Charlotte Motor Speedway ROVAL, only to be resurrected when Alex Bowman‘s car was disqualified, something Reddick couldn’t control?

What if Reddick then kicked ass through the final four races of the season and won the title?

Criticisms of the format itself aside, who did it played a part in the backlash to a format that’s been with us for more more than a decade.

Broadly, I’ve been a fan of the current playoff format since it’s inception (but even I was rooting for Ryan Newman to break it in 2014 when he was positioned to claim the championship without winning a race; of course, Matt Crafton finally did it in 2019).

Could it use some tweaks? You betcha.

Fewer drivers, a multi-race final round and imposing a rule that a driver must be 25th or 30th in points to be eligible would go a long way.

But the growing chorus from the gallery wants more than tweaks.

Apparently, bullying works. On two fronts.

Jeff Gluck at The Athletic has been busy this week. On Sept. 21, during the “Teardown” podcast, Gluck revealed that NBC recused itself having a significant say in what the eventual playoff changes would look like, leaving NASCAR to do what “was best” for the sport.

Good! Back in August I wrote about how it seemed NBC had some sway in dictating certain aspects of the sport, specifically the playoffs.

Then on Thursday, Gluck reported this nugget.

“NASCAR is now seriously weighing the possibility of drastically overhauling the playoffs or doing away with them altogether,” Gluck wrote. “A modified playoff system, in which the most criticized elements of the current format are tweaked, may still win out. Yet the mere chance of going back to a 36-race schedule determining the series champion — a scenario which seemed borderline impossible seven months ago — marks a dizzying turnaround that speaks to a crossroads for stock car racing.”

Oh.

The fact a 36-race format could become a reality is, in a word, surreal.

The very loud section of NASCAR fans (and Mark Martin) who want to do away with the playoffs entirely and return to a 36-race format may actually get their wish.

But then what?

Pointing the finger at the current format and saying its the cause of the ills that have plagued NASCAR for the last 20 years is ignorant at best.

It also ignores the realities of 2025 and NASCAR’s place in it. The NFL is the NFL. Going up against the behemoth that keeps growing, regardless of format, will always be a losing battle. One has to think that’s part of the reason the NTt IndyCar Series’ season ends before September.

Then there’s the media landscape, which becomes more fractured with each passing day.

It’s not 2005 anymore, when network TV was still king for content other than sports and the word streaming wouldn’t be applied to the Internet for half a decade.

There are too many options to distract a potential viewer from watching NASCAR on Sunday. A potential return of a 36-race format isn’t going to undo any of the many outlying factors that work against NASCAR’s hopes of reaching more people.

Could some lapsed fans get back on the bandwagon? Sure.

But going back to the format of yesteryear isn’t going to take NASCAR back in time.

As much as I wish there were the case.

Daniel McFadin is a 10-year veteran of the NASCAR media corp. He wrote for NBC Sports from 2015 to October 2020. He currently works full time for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and is lead reporter and an editor for Frontstretch. He is also host of the NASCAR podcast “Dropping the Hammer with Daniel McFadin” presented by Democrat-Gazette.

You can email him at danielmcfadin@gmail.com.