With the Olympics coming to a conclusion, sports fans can return to arbitrarily rooting for teams and individuals rather than using a nationalist framework to guide fandom. The closure of the games also means a shift back to all the other goofy ways of scoring sports, like football and its goofy points scheme or NASCAR and its stage wins and however else the drivers accumulate points.
With two weeks off to forget about the sport, NASCAR returns to action this weekend with the Trucks and Cup series doing their drive-in-circles thing at Richmond Raceway. What is utterly fascinating is the approaches the two series have going into this weekend. Having last raced on July 19th, the trucks are coming off their hiatus to…wrap up the regular season.
That’s right; this weekendʻs race is the one that sets the playoffs, which begin in two weeks’ time at the Milwaukee Mile. While in some sports, the concept of bye weeks is meant to provide an opportunity for dominant teams/players to rest while their less successful peers battle it out, the three-week layoff for the Trucks drivers is just another one of the quirks in the scheduling that never makes sense with the series.
Hence, after a break, the teams and drivers return to the track for one race that determines the field and the seeding for the playoffs. That makes sense. Or something. But then again, not only has the schedule been goofy for some time now, but the other aspect is that the announcers have been talking about the playoffs, oh, since the season started.
Forgive me if I argue that all of the playoff talk actually loses me sometimes. The fact that the three national touring series fail to start the playoffs at the same time makes the whole endeavor even more silly.
It would be easy to turn the focus here into one of disparaging the playoffs altogether and hoping/wishing/pushing for their downfall and for them never to exist again. That’s not the goal. Those columns have all been written for years and by scribes smarter than me. That is a cottage industry at this point that finally needs to close its doors and recognize that whether or not the old system was better has nothing to do with how things are now. The playoffs are part of the sport whether we like it or not. From a dialectical behavior theorist’s perspective, it is what it is.
The unaligned structure of things is where the sport takes goofy and moves to asinine. If the playoffs for the Trucks start on Aug. 25, then certainly the playoffs for Xfinity and Cup start soon thereafter.
Nah, that would be too logical.
In fact, and while it seems like it would be easy information to just run across from the jump, it is not as well advertised as one might expect, but the Xfinity playoffs start in Kansas…on Sept. 28. You do not have to be a mathematician to see that the Xfinity Series starts their playoffs a whole month after the Trucks do. Does that make sense? I recently re-watched Interstellar, and one of the the aspects of the film was the attempt to find new worlds that were suitable for human existence, and that film made way more sense than how NASCAR has decided to play its competitions.
But wait, there’s more. Since NBC took over the 2024 Cup schedule from Fox, the talking heads have continually and consistently talked about the playoffs ad nauseam. (Please recognize that using ad nauseam here is an emphasis on the absurdity of how often and incessantly the NBC peeps have brought up the topic.) Yet, one of things that they rarely discuss is when the playoffs actually f*&&ing begin! And when is that, you might ask? Oh, not for another four races.
The Cup playoffs begin in Atlanta on Sept. 8. This sport is so tripped out on itself that it does not even understand the early-aughts’ notion of synergy and how that can, sometimes, be a good thing. Rather than provide any kind of uniformity to make things easy for fans to follow, it is like the organizers in the sport instead chose to throw darts blindly and accept the scheduling while reciting the mantra: I choose chaos. Congrats, it worked.
One of the things that helps other sports succeed is the predictability and simplicity of how they are run. That is to say that, with the major sports, the playoffs begin and recognizing this element is an easy thing. Yet with NASCAR, we get staggered playoff structures that encourage confusion and with it, indifference.
This situation is a simple fix and yet one so logical that it will never happen. Start the playoffs for all three series at the same damn time and quit making something so simple so damn complicated.
We all have enough on our proverbial plates; how about simplifying something so that we can just enjoy the process, rather than trying to figure out when, what and where the process even happens?
As a writer and editor, Ava anchors the Formula 1 coverage for the site, while working through many of its biggest columns. Ava earned a Masters in Sports Studies at UGA and a PhD in American Studies from UH-Mānoa. Her dissertation Chased Women, NASCAR Dads, and Southern Inhospitality: How NASCAR Exports The South is in the process of becoming a book.
Simplicity and Nascar are two things that should never be mentioned together. Only Nascar and money.
Like they “simplified” the POINT system because the Latford system was too complicated! Now you need Big Blue to figure all the permutations!