From the same article linked below: Don't count Kevin Harvick among those who think the Chase rules should be changed to increase the importance of winning. "That is like saying it would be fair that the New York Yankees could be in the World Series because they beat the Red Sox and lost every other game," Harvick said. "If you can't put a whole season together, you don't deserve to be in the Chase, as far as I am concerned, unless you do what you can every week. In other sports, they don't let the guys who beat the best team play in the playoffs. ... That is not how it is." Wrong. Wrong. WRONG. If the Yankees beat the Red Sox all nineteen times they played and lost every other game, their record would be 19-143. I'm reasonably sure that no sane person would argue that the Yankees should be in the playoffs. As a matter of fact, the Cubs are in last-place but own a winning record (11-8) against the first-place Cardinals, but no one is calling for the Cubs to be in the playoffs, because that's not how it works. How about if the Red Sox and Yankees played a four-games series with these scores: BOS 4 NY 3 BOS 3 NY 2 BOS 9 NY 8 NY 15 BOS 0 Would anyone argue (besides maybe a Yankee fan) that the Yankees a superior result, simply because of the margin of victory? No. How about this then? Driver A finishes 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 39th. Driver B finishes 4th, 5th, 6th, and 18th. Who has had the better set of results, the guy with the win and three top-3 finishes or the guy whose BEST finish is fourth? You know who NASCAR would say did. (Hint: It's NOT the guy with the win.)

Not because he's my favorite driver, although he is the only NASCAR Nextel Cup driver I've ever actually met, but because of this quote found here: NASCAR considering giving more points to race winners. Two drivers - Jeff Burton and Mark Martin - made the Chase without a win, while Tony Stewart (two wins) and Greg Biffle (one win) are 11th and 12th, respectively, in points and out of Chase contention. Burton noted that the point system does not reward a team for winning as much as it penalizes a team for performing poorly. "That is something nobody really puts any emphasis on, the penalty for doing poorly," Burton said. "If you have a terrible, terrible race, that is a huge penalty that you pay." Hooray for Jeff Burton! Now I hope he points out the silliness of different point totals for guys who crash out in the same wreck.

Not that I think this proves my point about anything, but I just was looking at the Truck Series standings and noticed this: 21 Kerry Earnhardt - 1480 22 Bill Lester - 1461 23 Erin Crocker - 1442 24 Joey Miller - 1429 25 Mark Martin - 1404 Kerry Earnhardt, Bill Lester, and Erin Crocker have zero top-10s in 48 combined starts. Zero. Joey Miller has fifteen starts with one top-10 finish, actually a fifth, but he's behind those other three drivers. Right. Oh, and there's that guy in 25th with four wins. On a separate tanget, am I the only one who just now started noticing EC next to Evernham all the time? She was there in Victory Lane at California and she was on the pit box at Richmond. Was she always there like that and I just started noticing, or is it a thing where since Jeremy Mayfeld let the cat out of the bag theyve decided to start doing that?

But I just got my new MacBook Pro. WHOOOOOOOOOOOOO-HOO~!

One of my main beefs with the NASCAR points system is that I believe it unfairly punishes guys for a bad finish compared to how much it rewards them for a good one. This conclusion is easy to reach when a guy can win five races and have nine top-5s and be behind guys with zero wins and four top-5s in the standings, which is actually the case today, as the guy with five wins (Kasey Kahne) is currently three points behind the guy with zero wins (Jeff Burton) by three points. (You might say, well, it's JUST three measly points, but if the 20 had finished 11th instead of 18th at Richmond, they'd be the three points that kept Kasey out of the Chase.) (Also, Jeff Burton didn't just make up ground to the points leaders by making the Chase, he also gained separation from the guys behind him. Jeff Gordon was two point behind Burton and he's now five, and Kahne was only three points behind Burton and he's now ten. I wonder if they'll do something about that.) The three point-margin is easy to see by taking both guys three worst finishes. Kahne's are 35th, 36th, and 39th, good for 159 points, and Burton's are 33rd, 34th, and 42nd, good for 162 points. I think most people would agree that a guy with five wins and 13 top-8 finishes (that's half the races) has had a better season than a guy with zero wins and nine top-8 finishes, although Burton does have an astounding twelve finishes between 9th and 17th while Kasey finished between 21st and 31st six times. Kasey's fifteen best finishes are 182 points better than Burton's, so essentially Burton has a lead on Kasey in points because his eleven worst finishes are "better" than Kasey's eleven worst. That doesn't seem right to me, but it got me to thinking, what about head-to-head finishes? It might seem like there is a real injustice if a guy beat another guy 18 out of 26 times on the track but was behind him in points because of the other eight finishes. To that end, I compared the three guys in NASCAR's top-10 but not in mine to the guys who are in mine but not in NASCAR's, and their results from race-to-race, against each other head-to-head. TONY STEWART - (JJD rank: 4, NASCAR rank: 11) CARL EDWARDS - (JJD rank: 9, NASCAR rank: 13) GREG BIFFLE - (JJD rank: 10, NASCAR rank: 12) DENNY HAMLIN - (JJD rank: 11, NASCAR rank: 5) JEFF BURTON - (JJD rank: 12, NASCAR rank: 8) MARK MARTIN - (JJD rank: 13, NASCAR rank: 7) I didn't come up with a grand conclusion, but I thought the results were interesting and since I went through the trouble of figuring it out, here you go. Hamlin beat Stewart 15-11 Martin tied Stewart 13-13 Stewart BEAT Burton 15-11 Honestly, I was thinking here I was about to prove Burton really didn't belong in the Chase. Or something. Hamlin beat Edwards 14-12 Edwards BEAT Burton 14-12 Martin beat Edwards 14-12 Here, too. In any stick-and-ball sport, let's say two teams meet 26 times. If team A beats team B fourteen times in extremely tight games, and team B wins twelve games by blowouts, team A is still ahead in the standings. If the NASCAR suits are trying to create "playoff" excitement based on emulating the stick-and-ball sports, that might be something they want to take into account. Biffle BEAT Hamlin 14-12 Burton beat Biffle 14-12 Martin beat Biffle 16-10 Hmm. Biffle beating Hamlin but losing to Burton wasn't something I was expecting. I guess all that proves is that MARK MARTIN RULES.