Before we go any further here, I want to congratulate Kevin Harvick and all the rest of Richard Childress racing for a well-earned 2010 Sprint Cup Championship. As we all know, Harvick beat Jimmy Johnson by 285 points, talking the title from Jimmy Johnson, who won his second championship last year…oh wait, none of it happened that way, did it?? That’s right, thanks to Nascar’s obsessive tinkering, JJ has won his 5th in a row. And for all of the sanctioning body’s gyrations and the breathless hype from their talking head sycophants they still could not match what would have happened using the old point system in 2006, when Jimmy Johnson would have beaten Matt Kenseth by a whopping 4, that’s right, 4 points. In 2008, again with the old system, Carl Edwards would have beaten the intrepid JJ by a mere 16 points. The point is that there would have been some very compelling and memorable point battles (albeit all of them including the currently unbeatable #48) without attempting to force the sport to mimic stick and ball sports with some form of ‘post season.’

In Nascar’s defense, they are in a bit of a predicament, some of it is their own doing, some of it is the world they live in. In becoming the dominant racing sanctioning body in the country and one of the most important in the world, Nascar has also become a huge monster that requires tens of millions of dollars a year to feed itself. The revenue the tracks generate through traditional ticket sales, concession stands, etc, can’t even begin to pay today’s purses, after the track overheads are taken out. The sport would wither and die without the millions generated from television, plain and simple. And, what is also plain and simple is…that torrent of revenue is directly related to how many people, especially in that holy grail of the 18-35 demographics, are watching.