Throughout NASCAR history, the champions of the sport have always been able to point to a statistic or two that made the difference on their path to the championship.
For drivers such as Lee Petty and Matt Kenseth, average finish and top-10 finishes paved the way for a quiet, yet consistent journey to the championship stage.
For others, such as Kyle Larson in 2021, it was dominance in the forms of race wins and laps led.
Enter stage left, Joey Logano, who led the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series field in exactly zero major statistical categories.
Logano’s average finish? 17.1, the worst of any Cup Series champion over 75 years of competition. He finished top 10 in just 36.1% of races and led just 414 laps — numbers that, even in previous years, were not championship caliber.
Enter stage right, the NASCAR playoffs, the catalyst and mastermind behind Logano’s miracle run to a third NASCAR title.
It was through the playoffs and the playoffs alone that Logano even had a chance to compete for the championship after a fuel-mileage win at Nashville. It was via Alex Bowman’s disqualification following the race at the Charlotte Roval that afforded him a berth in the Round of 8. And it was another fuel-mileage victory at Las Vegas that gave him both a Championship 4 berth and two extra weeks to prepare for the final race at Phoenix.
And yes, when the laps mattered the most, it was Logano who etched his name in history as a three-time NASCAR Cup Series champion.
But make no mistake about it: Logano’s three championships are not the same three championships won by David Pearson, Petty, Darrell Waltrip, Tony Stewart or Cale Yarborough.
The following words aren’t meant to be an indictment of Logano, who simply followed the rules, but an indictment of NASCAR’s playoff system, which has just crowned — from a statistical standpoint, at least — the worst champion in NASCAR Cup Series history.
The definition of a championship-caliber season has been completely lost.
Decimated. Disintegrated. Destroyed. Whatever adjective you want to use, the concept remains clear: NASCAR can no longer decide what a championship-caliber driver is.
A six-win season from Kyle Larson? Not good enough. A year from Christopher Bell where he had more top-five finishes (15) than Logano had top 10s (13)? Not good enough.
It was Larson who led over four times the laps that Logano did and Chase Elliott who ended the year with an average finish nearly 5.5 positions better than that of Logano. It was a fellow Championship 4 driver in William Byron who finished inside the top three 11 times, just two times fewer than Logano finished inside the top 10.
But on Sunday afternoon, it wasn’t Elliott, Bell, Byron or Larson hoisting the Bill France Cup.
Long gone are the days of the classic Winston Cup season-long points format — in which Logano would’ve finished 11th, by the way — deciding the champion over 36 races. Gone are the days of the 10-race chase, in which, once again, points accumulation decided the champion.
Modern championships are won because drivers and teams won the races they had to.
Credit should be given to Logano and the No. 22 team for being opportunistic, but his third title could become a watershed moment for NASCAR — and not a good one.
If a below-average season is good enough to win a championship, the definition of a championship-caliber NASCAR season is as clear as mud.
Congratulations, Joey Logano: You’ve successfully torn the NASCAR playoff format to shreds.
