pasta_maldonado wrote:Onxy Wrecked wrote:watka wrote:What is it with Americans and having a play-off format for everything? I'm quite into ice hockey but I still can't get my head around the teams playing all these games in the normal season and then meaning nothing as the Stanley Cup play-offs start (yes, there's the Presidents' Trophy, but its nowhere near as prestigious as the Stanley Cup) - particularly as a Canucks fan! It seems The Chase does practically the same.
Without the Chase there was a situation about ten years ago where Matt Kenseth secured the championship at Rockingham with one race to go. Remember that Kenseth had only won once all that season and drove much like Clint Bowyer has this season with extreme consistency and a flood of 5th to 15th place finishes.
While a normal championship system sounds good, what you've got to remember is that most NASCAR fans are idiots of the 'MOAR ACTION! MOAR CRASHES! 'MRICA BATHPLUG YEAH' type and therefore don't care about consistency.
I feel like that is only representative of very casual watchers of the sport, and while they do fill a larger amount of the fan base, that is simply because more people watch sports, like NASCAR, without the levels of dedication many others do. Calling most NASCAR fans "idiots" is in bad taste. After all, every sport has its fans, including F1, that are there merely for the drama. There are no more of them for any other fan base than in NASCAR, its just that stereotypes of typical southern Americans having this sort of mentality has become painfully mainstream, to the degree where many NASCAR fans are thrown into this false stereotype. The only reason it may seem like many to you is because those that do fit the description are very vocal about the sport.
I think you'll find that the Chase format has as many proponents as it does critics here in the US. It's just a classic case of whining by both parties that the sport needs this or that. In my eyes, as long as we are racing, regardless of point systems and championship formats, its perfect. I think that whatever the governing body, be it NASCAR or the FIA, is going to do, in the long run it'll be the right decision. Changes are just part of motorsports, and we should just get used to the changes that are happening rather than blasting them every chance available for years.