After Tony Stewart tied Carl Edwards in points for the Sprint Cup championship, Stewart commented that he had thrown so much at Edwards and he was too nice of a guy to respond. Maybe there lies the reason why Tony will get the big bucks and the crown and Edwards will fall short another time. The old adage that nice guys finish last may apply here.
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[/media-credit]Not that Edwards didn’t perform. No one and I mean no one, had a better ten races in the Chase than Edwards. Maybe that was the problem. Edwards constantly finished in the top five race after race, with the notable exception of Martinsville where he struggled to finish tenth. It just wasn’t enough and the mind games Stewart put out were brutal. Stewart was the bully. Even during the race when his radio transmissions were pretty aggressive, he was confident and on plan. He was going to will this championship. One has to wonder why it didn’t happen in the first 26 races, and that becomes the problem. What makes a team flounder for 26 races and still win five of the last ten? It’s a mystery and mirrors the St. Louis Cardinals, a team that found itself 10 games behind in August, climb to the World Series championship. What causes this?
In the Cardinals case, it has a lot to do with desire and the competition. Good teams fins the weakness of the opposition. The Cardinals were able to find that weakness that each team had, exploit it, and find a way to win. The same could be said for Stewart. They knew Edwards would finish in the top five, so the only solution was to win, win, and win. And that’s exactly what they did.
I consider this the flaw of the Chase system. It places too much emphasis on the championship. I can remember years ago when David Pearson won two titles, and Cale Yarborough won three straight, and the fans only wondered how many races both had won. Richard Petty won seven titles, and likewise Dale Earnhardt, but the big question was how many races they won. Then came Pearson, running a partial schedule, and won race after race. Bill Elliott won 11 races and lost the championship to Darrell Waltrip. Who do you think was the most followed? Then someone in the offices at Daytona Beach (and I think you know who that is) decided we need to follow the stick and ball sports. We had to have a playoff and a champion.
My guess is the point system devised by Bob Latford so long ago (and I had the pleasure of discussing this with the late Mr. Latford) might have been the right method. A season with a playoff is pretty much an anomaly. It’s all about who gets hot at a certain point in time, but a season-long system that awards the team that had the best overall season should be the winner. But in NASCAR’s desire to be like the NFL, MLB, and NBA (the competition, you know), we had to have a playoff—a “game seven experience,” to justify our sport. Bunk.
But we will continue as we are as the media and everyone praises how the season came to an end with a tie and it was the closet championship in history, which it was with a little help from the sanctioning body.
Was Carl Edwards too nice a guy to win a championship? No, he was a victim of the system. A system that once rewarded a full season of excellence and changed to excellence over ten races. Jimmie Johnson rode this to five straight championships, and Tony Stewart rode it to the 2011 title. When you play within the rules, no one has a gripe.
Here’s to Lucky Dogs and Shotgun Starts. The old system worked for a long time. Congratulations to Tony Stewart, Rick Hendrick, and Chevrolet. You had a great year. Enjoy the championship you deserved, but beware of the contrived changes in the future
