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Last week, I was reading through Robin Miller’s Mailbag. I came across a very lengthy letter that had a well-thought out suggestion on how IndyCar could structure a season-ending playoff method to crown its champion. It involved racing on fall holidays (Columbus Day, Veterans Day) on a street course, road course and an oval. The finale would be the oval contested in prime time on Veterans Day at Fontana.

Like Robin Miller did, I’ll give the guy credit for his creativity. Unlike what Miller said, this conversation needs to stop. Now! The playoff advocate said that IndyCar could not survive another five to ten years without some sort of playoff system in place. I strongly disagree.

What am I missing here? Why does anyone in the world think that IndyCar needs a playoff? I know, I know…I’m old and have outdated thinking. Thanks to my wife last week, you all now know how old I am. But this has nothing to do with age, being a traditionalist or having outdated thinking. This is just common sense.

For the last fifteen years or so, NASCAR has decided its championship with an end of season playoff-type format. For years they referred to this format as The Chase to the Championship or just The Chase. But a couple of years ago, they decided that it must be referred to only as The Playoffs. Every time I hear an announcer or anyone refer to the end of the NASCAR season as The Playoffs, I hear a little Jim Mora voice going off in my head.

But unlike that famous video of Mora that I still find funny more than twenty years later, I cringe just a little bit when I hear talk of the NASCAR playoffs.

Each year since its inception, the NASCAR playoff-system has gotten more and more convoluted. Its even more confusing than the Indianapolis 500 Qualifying format that has been in place since 2014 and I quit trying to understand that a couple of years ago.

The thing is – these aren’t playoffs. Those that don’t make each cut aren’t sitting at home watching the final races on television. When the Dodgers and Red Sox started playing the World Series last week, the Yankees, Astros, Brewers and Rockies weren’t still playing. They were done. Their seasons were over and they had scattered for the offseason. The baseball field had been whittled down to two teams who were still playing. Some might say only one team continued to play in the World Series, as Boston met little resistance as they clinched the series in only five games by beating LA again last night 5-1.

The NASCAR fields may be whittled down for eligibility to win the title, but there are still cars that didn’t sniff a victory all season still racing alongside.

I can think of a lot of bad points about a playoff system with IndyCar, but the worst may be that it cheapens the earlier races. I can’t stand the concept of double-points for any race, and I’ve said so here many times. But I would take that over a system that puts more emphasis on the last three races of the season – just because they happen to be held in warm weather locations.

Think about it. Portland is apparently staying in its late season slot. Do we really want Portland to be deemed as a much more important road race than Barber, Road America or Mid-Ohio? It would be if it is part of the playoffs and the others are not. The early races would be considered as stepping-stone races just to position a driver to get into the playoffs (there goes that Jim Mora voice again). What they do in the playoffs is much more important than getting there.

The Chicago Cubs won a lot of games this past season. However, they stumbled in the last week of the regular season and had to play a one-game playoff with Milwaukee just to determine who was the Wild Card. They then had a Wild Card play-in game (they called it a playoff, but it was really playing for the right to join the playoffs) and proceeded to lose it in forgettable fashion. Those early games meant nothing because when the Cubs got to the post-season, they did nothing. It’s the last two games that their fans will remember this winter.

I don’t want St. Petersburg, Barber and Long Beach to be meaningless. Every race should matter equally, but in a playoff scenario – their significance would be diminished.

That’s why I’ve never been a fan of double-points – even with the Indianapolis 500. There was something pure about the fact that even though the Indianapolis 500 was the biggest race in the world, it paid the same amount of points as Iowa or Toronto.

While IndyCar is slowly but surely digging its way out of a ton of problems, their championship was not one of them. Since Tony Kanaan wrapped up the 2004 championship prior to the season finale at Texas, every championship battle has been carried into the season finale. Granted, had double-points for the season finale not been in effect in 2016 – Simon Pagenaud would have wrapped up the championship in the penultimate race at Watkins Glen. Still, that’s a strong argument to leave the championship alone.

The IndyCar season is roughly sixteen to eighteen races every year, stretching from March to September or October. That’s not a lot of races over that large block of time. It’s not like NASCAR that has more than twice as many races from February to November. I guess when your series runs practically every single weekend, things get in a rut and you feel the need to spice things up.

Going into any given season, it’s unpredictable which races might be snoozers while others keep you on the edge of your seat. Since Pocono has returned to the schedule, they’ve held races that fell into both categories. It’s just the nature of the beast. But with so few races, I simply don’t think that IndyCar needs to spice up the races within the fan base. It’s the people that are not fans that IndyCar needs to go out and get. You don’t cultivate new fans with a complicated, hard-to-explain system of crowning your champion.

Ever since NASCAR introduced The Chase, which devolved into The Playoffs – I’ve always thought that it reeked of desperation and gimmickry. As time went on and they kept tweaking it and making it harder to understand; it almost became comical. But if IndyCar ever adopted a playoff system – I would not be laughing (thanks to Phil Kaiser for schooling me on the difference between adapted and adopted). It would be one of the saddest developments since I learned of the infamous 25/8 rule.

But for whatever reason, I’m seeing more and more people say that IndyCar needs a playoff. Why would they want such a thing? It’s like wishing for herpes. Once you get it, you’re stuck with it. So if any of you are seriously asking for IndyCar to start doing a NASCAR-like playoff format – just stop it!

George Phillips

This entry was posted on October 29, 2018 at 4:04 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.