NASCAR May Be Considering Changes to Playoffs

On Sunday, November 10th, 2024 Joey Logano set a record set a record: he became the NASCAR Cup Series champion with the worst average finish ever, a low water mark of 17.1 over the 36-race season. It was the culmination of three straight seasons of Penske and Ford dominance at Phoenix, an intentional strategy to focus on winning championships over putting up championship-level numbers. After Logano's latest win, reports suggest that NASCAR may have finally seen enough of its current format.

According to Adam Stern of the Sports Business Journal, NASCAR is now planning to review its four-round elimination playoff format. That could lead to changes as soon as next year, but a set 2025 schedule of race weekends means that a seriously updated system could have to wait until 2026. If changes happen, the updates would be the first since NASCAR introduced stage points to the elimination format in 2017.

As a refresher, NASCAR currently runs a 10-race playoff for 16 drivers. The field is filled first by full-time drivers with race wins and the regular season champion, then additional at-large bids are given out to the highest remaining drivers in the standings, if applicable. Points are awarded throughout the field after every race and through the top 10 during "Stage Breaks" twice in the middle of each race, or three times in one particular race.

Most points reset at the start of the playoffs and after every round, but "Playoff Points" awarded to winners of both those "Stages" and the races themselves accrue throughout the year and are added back to a driver's total before each of the first three rounds. Additional playoff points are awarded by regular season championship results.

All of that is just to set the field. Things really get out of hand when the elimination rounds begin. Each of the first three rounds of three races advance every eligible race winner and eliminate the four remaining drivers that are lowest in points, leaving just four at the end to go into a final race with no points on the line. The top four spots in the championship are decided by the results of that race—meaning that a driver who wins the previous 35 races but finishes fourth among contenders in that event would be only credited with fourth in the championship.

By giving competitors so many hoops to jump through, those contrived and confusing rules are supposed to create problems for teams – and chaos for fans to enjoy. The plan has a huge flaw, though: One team seems to have figured out that the best strategy is to focus only on that final hoop.

As Team Penske has illustrated for three straight years, only performance at the unique Phoenix Raceway finale actually matters. Getting into the Championship Four race is not necessarily an impossible feat, even for a team that has languished in mediocrity all year; a driver just has to survive to the third round by staying out of trouble and, generally, win a race in that round. Once a driver advances on some combination of good-enough performance and the sort of great luck Joey Logano found with a winning strategy at Las Vegas last month, all that really matters is what happens at Phoenix.

Because the format rewards performance at Phoenix—a lightly banked one-mile track with a fifth identifiable corner and a paved pit exit apron that can be run on every lap—championship-caliber teams like Penske are actually rewarded for designing cars that are compromised on other, more notable tracks.

Not only does that mean a mediocre team can win titles, it means that a championship team can look more mediocre by definition when their cars struggle on the less important tracks the series visits more often. This can be resolved by changing the finale race regularly, but that would fix just one of many flaws in a system that has not exactly driven overwhelming interest in NASCAR since it was introduced in 2014.