So, Jimmie Johnson won his fifth straight Sprint Cup championship yesterday. An hour afterwards, the top story on ESPN.com was the half-finished Patriots-Colts game.
Does anyone else think that that the "Worldwide Leader in Sports" would consider a five-time, say, World Series winner to be less newsworthy than a semi-meaningful regular-season football game? That right there tells you everything you need to know about how the mainstream sporting world views NASCAR.
And - apologies to the 48 team, but their winning streak is part of the reason why. It's not just that Johnson is too predictable to love and too boring to hate. I suspect that, even if perennial most-popular-driver Dale Jr. were to knock off five championships in a row, a lot of fans would be tuning out at this point. Sports fans like underdogs and long-shots; that's what makes sport, sport.
It seems that Johnson's team is uniquely suited to take advantage of the Chase format, which essentially turns the season into a 10-race sprint at the very end. They've got it figured out, and good for them. But, as a fan, it's demoralizing to see a team lead the standings for seven months only to see the driver's lead erased. Sure, in other sports it's possible for a wild card team 10 spots out of the lead to rip off a few playoff wins and take the whole thing. But usually not the same team for five years in a row.
Several years ago, after Matt Kenseth won the [Fill in the Sponsor Here] Cup, NASCAR's brain trust devised the Chase format believing that it would be more exciting to have a tight 10 (now 12) way race to the finish. But it hasn't really worked out that way. The News & Observer reported last week that ESPN's race broadcast ratings were down 13 percent over last year. Whatever NASCAR is doing isn't working.
2 comments:
As a Jimmie Johnson hater i feel it should be pointed out that if an NFL team cracked off 5 titles in a row while their head coach was getting fined and suspended the whole time for cheating there's no damn way we'd believe they were legit titles. Remember spygate?
That, too. I remain pissed off that Johnson is considered a Daytona 500 champion when he won in a car so illegal it got his crew chief suspended for - what was it, six races?
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