Nov 24, 2008

Sure Ain't No Super Bowl

The duel between Jimmie Johnson and Carl Edwards might have been the most interesting battle for the Sprint Cup championship since NASCAR instituted the Chase for the Cup format five years ago. Through much of the final race of the season at Homestead-Miami, Edwards maintained a theoretical chance to overtake Johnson for the title…but virtually all his hopes were pinned on Johnson wrecking (pretty unlikely since he was in safety-first mode) or Johnson breaking (even more unlikely since the Hendrick folks know how to prep a car). So those of us who watched saw the eventual champion drive for much of the day like a scared old lady, looking far less competitive than his rival who would finish No. 2. The guys who wrote Days of Thunder sure wouldn’t have structured their screenplay that way.

What this points out, very dramatically, is that the Chase is a failure. Designed to give 12 drivers a chance to win the Sprint Cup, that is true essentially in theory only, and the chance to win for anybody down the list of contenders is basically one chance in hell. While the first Chase brought an air of anticipation, by now the race fans and the TV audience have grasped the essential hollowness of the whole exercise. Constructed to give NASCAR a boost much like the baseball or football playoffs, the Chase has simply not lived up to that expectation. TV ratings for Chase races are only so-so, and ABC, the network blessed with the Chase races, doesn’t even attempt to get a premium for the ads that run in Chase race coverage. And, far from full houses, the most recent Chase races were greeted by thousands of empty seats.

Of course, one of the reasons the Chase doesn’t score with the audience like a playoff is that it isn’t a playoff. The same drivers you’ve seen from top to bottom in every other Sprint Cup race are still around -- even the “rolling chicane” back-of-the-packers, who contribute little but the possibility of a spectacular wreck. Drivers fall out of contention for the Cup along that way -- that’s true. But it doesn’t happen in the dramatic you-lose-you’re-gone way that it does in the stick and ball sports. They could fall from contention during a pit stop, and no one is ever the wiser.

Of course, the public’s tepid response to the Chase comes as no surprise to us. We’ve been advocating a much more radical change for years now. Maybe someday, NASCAR will take us up on it.