OPINION: A great story should not make NASCAR’s playoff system immune from good-faith criticism
by Ben Schneider / LASTCAR.info Staff Writer
PHOTO: James Gilbert/Getty Images
Harrison Burton entered Daytona International Speedway 34th in Cup Series points.
He exited the track guaranteed to finish a minimum of 16th in the final standings.
On Saturday night, Burton avoided the constant calamity and carnage for which superspeedway races are known to score an upset victory. It was also the long-awaited 100th win for Wood Brothers Racing, NASCAR’s longest active Cup Series team, which hadn’t won a Cup race since Ryan Blaney at Pocono in 2017 and had only won three points-paying Cup races since Morgan Shepherd at Atlanta in 1993.
Let me state that this is, unequivocally, a great moment for the sport on an individual race level. By all accounts, it is one of the biggest upset victories in modern NASCAR history, on par with Trevor Bayne’s “500” victory for the Wood Brothers at the same track over 13 years ago. It’s a feel-good story for a driver who doesn’t currently have a job for 2025. It’s a shot in the arm for a team with one of the greatest legacies in NASCAR, but one that has also struggled to find similar success over the last three decades. It’s an emotional moment for NASCAR Hall of Fame nominee Jeff Burton, now a broadcaster for NBC Sports, who got to listen to Leigh Diffey call his son home to an emotional victory. And it surely brought back similar memories for NBC’s Dale Jarrett, whose father Ned Jarrett experienced the same emotions in the same booth when Dale won the “500” 31 years ago, and whose son Jason Jarrett was atop the grandstands serving as Burton’s spotter.
It is absolutely a net positive.
But net positives should not completely cancel out good-faith criticism of NASCAR.
At the start of 2023, NASCAR dropped the requirement that drivers must be in the Top 30 in points to be playoff-eligible should they win a race. This rule ensured that a playoff spot would not be taken by a driver or team that had virtually no realistic path to a championship. Under this rule, Spire Motorsports’ No. 77 team did not qualify for the 2019 Owners’ Playoffs after Justin Haley’s shock win at the summer Daytona race.
However, that rule no longer exists. The only prerequisite for a driver and team to be eligible to race their way into NASCAR’s postseason is to be full-time.
To be completely fair, when there are only 34 such drivers and 36 such teams (Rick Ware Racing’s No. 15 and Kaulig Racing’s No. 16 use a rotation of drivers), I suppose there’s not much harm in extending eligibility down a few spots from 30th. If anything, if NASCAR wanted to make a change, it would have been more impactful to shift the requirement up to 25th in points, or even the original requirement of 20th for wild card “Chase for the Cup” drivers from 2011-13.
But NASCAR chose to go in the opposite direction, and as such, removed the requirement entirely. As ARCA PR director Charlie Krall tweeted, Burton’s win is a feature of the playoff system, not a bug. I agree with Krall’s assessment, but as readers of this site and viewers of my GRID Network shows are undoubtedly aware, I do not agree with how NASCAR currently crowns its champions.
I could go on for hours detailing all of the reasons why, but that’s an opinion piece for another day (if it weren’t redundant enough already). The main argument I want to make in this piece right here, right now, is this: we should be allowed to hold multiple opinions.
As Sportsnaut’s Matt Weaver tweeted nearly seven years ago, “loving a sport that you cover doesn’t inherently mean you turn a blind eye to its faults.” I respectfully disagree with SiriusXM NASCAR Radio’s Danielle Trotta, who tweeted on Monday that enjoying Harrison Burton’s win while not enjoying the playoff system “seems kinda contradictory.” How so? We can acknowledge that Burton’s upset victory for the Wood Brothers is a great story for the sport for numerous reasons. But in an era where everything seems to have “major playoff implications,” we cannot simply ignore the effect that their victory has on the playoff grid. It is completely valid to hold the opinion that the 34th-place team should not be elevated to a guaranteed top 16 points finish solely because of a single race victory. There is nothing in that opinion that criticizes Burton or his team.
I have never liked the “2007 Patriots” argument in defense of the playoff system. NASCAR is not a stick-and-ball sport. It’s a fool’s errand, in my opinion, to compare NASCAR’s playoffs to those of the NFL because only two teams play each other at once in the latter. The former has every competitor compete against everyone every week. Playoffs are necessary in the NFL to ensure the best teams have an opportunity to establish their superiority over one another. It is not - nor has it ever been - a requirement in motorsports.
But let’s suppose for a moment that such a comparison is valid. For the sake of consistency, would those using that “2007 Patriots” argument be willing to defend Burton’s playoff berth by also arguing a 2-14 NFL team that beats a 13-3 NFL team in Week 18 should be given a wild card spot in the NFL playoffs? Is that not essentially what NASCAR’s version of a playoff system has just allowed?
Some thought my initial reaction on Saturday night was too negative, and that I should have held my tongue on my grievances with the playoffs and just been happy for Burton in that feel-good moment. But with all due respect, I cannot allow myself to be dishonest regarding my feelings towards the system simply because “it’s a nice story.” NASCAR is not - nor should it ever be - above criticism. But we should also assume that not everyone providing that criticism is doing so in bad faith.
Because, as I often say, it’s possible to believe two things at the same time.
