Chase format needs to remain unchanged
It happens every time someone takes a commanding lead in NASCAR's championship race.
Especially when that someone is Jimmie Johnson, who is working on his third straight Cup title.
With three races remaining and Johnson holding a 183-point Chase lead, the natives became restless and the drumbeats began, with fans and some media calling for changes to NASCAR's Chase for the Sprint Cup.
In their defense, Johnson did hold the largest points lead anyone had ever had in the Chase. And with just three races remaining, it was shaping up as a ho-hum, anticlimactic conclusion to the 2008 season.
Adding to the apathy is the fact that Johnson — not exactly the most colorful, exciting NASCAR personality — is going to win again, tying Cale Yarborough's 30-year-old mark of three straight titles and continuing his reign atop the sport.
The fact that Johnson's lead was trimmed to 106 points by another Carl Edwards win at Texas will likely do little to quell the protests. Only a remarkable title-winning rally by Edwards and a complete collapse by Johnson will do that.
It's a favorite pastime of NASCAR competitors and fans: When someone shines and dominates, whine, complain and lobby for a rules change. It's the NASCAR way.
But the typical outcry is likely to fall on deaf ears this year. And it should.
The last thing NASCAR needs is yet another change to its championship format. What it needs to do is leave well enough alone and let the Chase play out over a significant period of time, something a bit longer than five years.
Actually, it has only been two years since the last tweak. Let us recap:
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The Chase was concocted and launched in 2004. Why? Because Matt Kenseth made a shambles out of the old point system in 2003, running away with the title (he won by only 90 points, but that was after a big late-season rally by Johnson) despite winning only one race.
The Chase, NASCAR's 10-race playoff, was a major change from the way the championship had been decided for the previous 30 years.
Then, just three years into the Chase, NASCAR decided to shake things up again, expanding the field from 10 to 12 teams for 2007, adding bonus points for race wins and changing the way Chase teams are seeded.
Ironically, this came after the ever-bland Johnson — Kenseth is a bit bland, too, making me sense a pattern here — won his first title.
The result was a somewhat close championship battle between Johnson and teammate Jeff Gordon last year.
Now, Johnson appears about to win by his biggest margin yet, sparking the latest outcry for change.
Those pleas are getting little support in the Sprint Cup garage, though. Even the Chase drivers Johnson is currently trouncing oppose dramatic changes.
"You can't make a rule to keep one guy from winning the championship,"
Greg Biffle told NASCAR Scene. "That's never worked in our sport."
"It is kind of foolish to want to make changes,"
Dale Earnhardt Jr. said. "This is kind of how we got in this spot in the first place. It's just going to snowball into more and more ... disagreement if we continue to change and change and change just because a guy has such a great year."
There are suggestions of some minor tweaks, such as a separate points system for Chase drivers and a mulligan for each contender, allowing him to throw out one bad race.
But even those are ridiculous ideas. If a driver has bad luck or a poor performance and finishes last, he should get last-place points. To not penalize him is unfair to the drivers who do perform and don't suffer misfortune.
The 10-race Chase has proved to be a good championship format, producing a close race more often than not, which is more than NASCAR could say for the old, 36-race system.
To change it just because one unpopular driver is dominating would be foolhardy — and unfair.
