Should Chase be tweaked to greater incentivize the regular season?
As a NASCAR fan, you've probably made a joke or 30 about NASCAR changing the Chase format.
After all, those jokes are based in some truth. Since the Chase was formed in 2004, it's been tweaked multiple times. Hell, it's been changed, on average, about every three years. And with 2016 being the third year of the elimination-style format of the current Chase, the jokes can be especially appropriate.
The most logical way the Chase could change in the near future is with the way regular-season excellence is rewarded. When speaking with reporters, Keselowski - already a two-time winner in 2016 - referenced a lack of motivation that can come from teams that have won in the regular season (if you win a race in the first 26 races of the season, you're practically guaranteed a Chase berth).
“I think clearly the sport is lacking some motivation once you’ve won a race,’’ Keselowski told reporters Monday at Team Penske’s shop. “I don’t think there’s any question that most of the competitors in the sport feel like that is not advantageous for a product we’re trying to put on and have floated some ideas to level that back out that maybe some people will like and maybe some won’t. We’ll have to see.
“At the end of the day, it’s never a good thing to remove motivation from the field.’’
Keselowski is incredibly correct. NASCAR billed the win-and-in Chase format as a way for drivers to always give 100 percent in the pursuit of victory. And while internal drive and other motivations keep a team from slacking off, it's easy to see how urgency can disappear for a driver and team that have multiple victories before the summer begins.
We're not sure what the "some ideas" entail, so we're going to float some of our own. Here's what we think they could be:
• Give the driver at the top of the points standings some sort of a bonus in the Chase. That bonus can be automatic exemption into the second round of the Chase or even 15 bonus points or so to make missing the first-round cutoff much harder. Keselowski said a bye made sense, especially given seeding formats in other sports.
• Reward drivers with multiple wins with bonus points. Right now, a driver with two wins in the regular season starts the Chase with three more points than a driver with one win.
• Bonus points for wins should carry throughout the Chase until the final round. At the beginning of the second and third rounds, the remaining drivers start with the same number of points. If a driver has four wins – even if one came in the first round of the Chase – he should have 12 extra points added to his tally for the start of the second round.
• Something else sensical that we haven't thought of.
With the Drivers Council having more influence when it comes to NASCAR governance, it's not much of a stretch to see changes to the Chase happen – and therefore your jokes to have some more relevance. But NASCAR CEO Brian France, as he is apt to do, poured a bit of cold water on any speculation that the Chase could be reformatted to help a regular season driver.
“You know what’s on NASCAR’s radar? Anything that will make the racing tighter, more compelling, closer finishes and more opportunities for different drivers," France said on SiriusXM's NASCAR channel. "So whatever it is that doesn’t break the bank for our team owners in particular, then we’re going to be open to it. We’ve been clear about that."
“The other side of that is they have a lot of incentive. Once you get a win in the regular season to hang it out, let loose for wins and everything else. Suddenly, if you had to have a points race within a points race, we’d have to think about what that does to that mentality that has been created that we like.”
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
