Joey Logano's 2024 run is exactly what NASCAR wanted for playoffs. But is it fair?

If one were to put Sunday’s South Point 400 at Las Vegas Motor Speedway into a time machine and send it to the 2003 NASCAR season, fans’ perception of the race would change dramatically. 

Rather than winning his way into the championship race, Joey Logano would’ve capped an otherwise mediocre season with a victory while Christopher Bell would’ve taken the points lead from Tyler Reddick, who flipped on lap 89. 

In actuality, Logano did earn a berth in the Championship Four while Reddick now finds his season in jeopardy after taking a short flight over the infield grass. 

Logano’s season has been one defined by fortunate breaks. At Nashville, he saved enough fuel to survive five overtime restarts, claiming a victory that locked him into a postseason he otherwise might not have participated in. 

A clutch performance at Atlanta resulted in another trip to victory lane and a guaranteed berth in the Round of 12, but his playoff run seemingly came to an end following the race at the Charlotte Roval on Oct. 13. 

Two hours after the checkered flag, however, Logano and the No. 22 team were given new life as a disqualification handed down to Alex Bowman knocked Bowman out of the playoffs and put Logano back in.

In poetic fashion, Logano and crew chief Paul Wolfe played the perfect strategy on Sunday afternoon. They saved just enough gas, then passed Daniel Suarez for the race lead before holding off a hard-charging Bell for the No. 22 team’s third victory of the season. 

The win gives Logano — who won the championship in 2018 and 2022 — his sixth Championship Four appearance, as well as two extra weeks of preparation for the championship race that his competitors won’t have. 

However, amid the confetti that adorned the desert backdrop of Sin City, fans realized that while a fun Cinderella story, Logano’s March Madness-esque run pokes plenty of holes in NASCAR’s case as to why the playoff crown legitimate champions. 

Let’s not mince words: Logano and Team Penske deserve heaps of praise for once more turning up the wick in the playoffs, as they seem to do every season.

However, the nature of motorsports competition — and, hence, how champions are decided — inherently differs from their stick and ball counterparts. Rather than competing against one other team, NASCAR drivers compete against 35 foes every week. Add in the litany of variables that can derail a race or a season in a matter of seconds (flat tires, blown motors, weather, a crash caused by other drivers, etc.) and NASCAR using short stretches of races to determine who is crowned a ‘worthy’ champion suddenly feels questionable.

It’s true that Logano has played the same game as his competitors all season, and he’s played it better. But when determining a champion over 36 weeks of competition, incidents like Reddick’s flip on Sunday or Logano’s miraculous win in Nashville happen far too often for one race to fairly determine the best driver over nine months of competition. 

NASCAR can’t afford to go back to a postseason-less existence, as the fact remains that it's not 2003 anymore. However, it wouldn’t kill the sanctioning body to consider alternatives that more accurately reflect the performance of a team over the entirety of the season, just as nearly every other racing league chooses to do. 

Logano deserves his flowers for gaming the system, but his success shouldn’t come at the expense of those who have put forth a championship-caliber performance all year.