This is not an entirely American phenomenon, though. I am not very familiar with non-American sports, but the ones I am familiar with do have playoff-style championships. The World Cup. The Olympics. What about Rugby? etc., etc....

NASCAR deserves credit for innovating, not flack. Motorsports are now less homogenous.

Those sports do not have all competitors on the field of play at the same time, so a knockout is the only way to suss out the best. And even then in football and cricket there are league championships.

NASCAR is like golf in that respect. And golf does not even have a championship. Indeed championships as a whole are otiose.

Twice in fact!

Been watching NASCAR for only a few years, and picked Jimmie as my driver the year before his first Cup Championship, so I've been pretty happy with my driver choice. My best mate, who's a Jeff Gordon fan is less pleased! I've been luck enough to get to 3 live races so far - Fontana 2007 Autumn, which Jimmie won, then the Spring Talladega race for the last 2 years. We're booked for the Daytona 500 in February. Hope I'll be able to buy 4x Champion gear there (fingers crossed).

Golf has the Fed-ex cup played over a number of weeks for a grand prize of $10 million or so for the winner, there is also the race to Dubai.

So you've just got a problem with championships in general. I mean, fair enough. They are certainly flukish. I mean, the Arizona Cardinals almost won the Super Bowl last year (almost...). But like I showed earlier, the chance of a driver winning the Chase four years straight randomly: 1:20,736 (my number were actually off earlier). It's certainly a measure of something. The question is just whether it measure something you think is worth measuring...

For me personally, I think winning the Super Bowl is more impressive than having the best record in the regular season, and I think winning the Chase is more impressive than having the most points over 36 races.

Anyhow, you should check out college football. They pretty much just play the regular season, have a computer decide how good everyone is, then put everyone into "Bowl Games" based on that. There isn't a playoff, so it's pretty much just a regular season and that's it. People pretty much universally hate it. The day before the 2008 election, Obama went on TV and campaigned against it. He won the election.

I've enjoyed the discussion.

pretty depressing race for a montoya and carl edwards fan

need some parts ment for jr to make it onto JJ's car instead....