2024 NASCAR Cup Series Playoff Odds: Joey Logano Drops a Playoff Bomb 💣
2024 NASCAR Cup Series Playoff Odds: Joey Logano Drops a Playoff Bomb 💣
How the forecast model looks after Logano's shock win at Las Vegas.
You can think you’ve got things figured out in NASCAR… and then the cars actually roll out onto the track.
That’s what happened last weekend in Las Vegas, when Joey Logano — the least likely driver to make the Championship 4, with an 18 percent chance according to my playoff forecast model — punched his ticket with a victory in a race where he only led six laps. Maybe we shouldn’t be too surprised: Logano was the series champion in 2022, after all, and he won the same exact race that year. But Logano’s performance this season was markedly down from two years ago (more on that later), and he needed Alex Bowman’s shocking postrace disqualification at Charlotte just to advance to the Round of 8 in the first place.
And yet, now Logano is locked into the Final Four of NASCAR — and he could very well win his second title in three seasons (and a third straight for Team Penske). That’s why they run the races, to borrow a turn of phrase.
Needless to say, Logano’s win threw a massive wrench in the middle of the playoff picture. To help process the aftermath, we’ll be looking at the updated odds from my NASCAR forecast, which simulates the rest of the playoffs 10,000 times to determine who has the best chance of advancing and, eventually, of winning the Cup Series championship:
Let’s use these numbers to break down what jumps out about the current state of the playoffs, ahead of Sunday’s Straight Talk Wireless 400 at Homestead–Miami Speedway.
⚙️ Larson has company at the top
As has usually been the case throughout these playoffs, Kyle Larson remains the title favorite — but now only by the slimmest of margins over Christopher Bell, after Bell led the majority of laps en route to a No. 2 finish at Vegas. (Larson, by comparison, wasn’t bad — he finished 11th, after working his way back from a tire problem on pit road — but he wasn’t much of a factor up front in a race he had been seriously favored to win.)
Larson is more likely to win the title at Phoenix conditional on advancing, but Bell has a better chance to make it through to the Championship 4. He now has more of a cushion relative to the cutline than Larson and has better records at the round’s two remaining tracks, while Larson has one fewer of his most dominant tracks left to work with. Both are more than 80 percent likely to advance, but Larson is in a slightly weaker position than he was before the Round of 8 began.
⚙️ Joey is a title threat (again)
As I wrote before last year’s playoffs, Logano is perennially a dangerous driver if he is ever able to advance to the Round of 8 or beyond, because he has such a stellar record at Phoenix and Las Vegas during his career. It’s just the getting there that has been in doubt. One of the reasons why Logano appeared to miss the Round of 8 before Bowman’s DQ was that he fell from a 157 Adjusted Pts+ index (or 57% above average) in 2022 to a Pts+ mark of just 123 this season. That rating, only 23% above the Cup Series average, is the lowest for any driver in the Championship 4 since the elimination format was adopted in 2014:
Now that he’s locked into the Round of 4, however, there’s no huge reason why Logano can’t win another championship. He’ll still be an underdog at Phoenix, simply because of the season-long quality of his performance relative to the drivers he’ll likely face there — and the fact that he hasn’t finished among the Top 10 there since winning the 2022 title race — but his career record at the single track that will determine the entire 2024 championship speaks for itself.
⚙️ Byron remains under pressure
In this space last week, I noted that William Byron was the driver under the most pressure in each of the next two races — his odds were basically 50-50, making them especially sensitive to any performance, good or bad.
Byron had a strong response, finishing fourth at Vegas and boosting his advancement odds to 64 percent. But he’s not out of the woods yet. In fact, he goes into Homestead with the highest leverage riding on the race, based upon how much his Championship 4 odds project to swing depending on how he finishes:
If the No. 24 car finishes Top 10 in Miami, it wouldn’t exactly punch his ticket — his odds would rise to 79 percent — but he’d be in a lot better shape than if he places in the twenties (41 percent) or thirties (29 percent). The good news for Byron is that he has a good recent record at Homestead, with four consecutive Top 12 runs, including a win in 2021 and a No. 4 finish the last time they ran at the track a year ago.
⚙️ Hamlin is still on an uphill road
One of the biggest NASCAR stories I’ve been tracking for many years now is Denny Hamlin’s quest to shed his “Best Driver to Never Win a Title” label and finally win his first Cup Series championship. But as things stand right now, the odds are against that happening in 2024.
In the model, Hamlin — who trails the cutline by 27 points — has just a 25 percent of making his fifth career Championship 4 appearance. He was probably the driver most directly hurt by Logano’s surprise win; he finished eighth at Vegas but still saw his advancement odds dip by 20 percentage points because one fewer spot in the Final Four became available. (And the drivers above him who haven’t clinched — Bell, Larson and Byron — are really tough to chase down after spotting them a 27-point lead.)
That’s why Denny’s path to Phoenix with title hopes intact relies on either winning at Homestead or Martinsville — or running strong and hoping for good luck. In simulations where Hamlin finishes Top 10 at both remaining Round of 8 tracks, he still only makes the Championship 4 roughly 50 percent of the time. So Denny very much doesn’t control his destiny from here.
⚙️ At least 1 big name — if not 2 or 3 — might be screwed
One of the most shocking moments from Sunday’s South Point 400 at Vegas was the wreck about a third of the way through, which ended up ruining three different playoff drivers’ days. Martin Truex Jr. squeezed Chase Elliott up into Tyler Reddick, who hit the wall and then flipped down the frontstretch; meanwhile, 2023 Cup champion Ryan Blaney swerved into the barrier to avoid Brad Keselowski, damaging his car as well.
This left a trio of playoff drivers among the six lowest finishers at Vegas, further shaking up a Round of 8 that scarcely needed more chaos.
The result? Reddick, Elliott and Blaney are all sitting below 20 percent odds to move on — and at least 30 points below the cut — with a pair of races remaining. That means we’re probably already in “must-win” territory for all three star drivers. While it’s not completely impossible for them to make it on points alone from here… it’s extremely unlikely, especially for Blaney and Elliott:
As a consequence of these dire odds all around, there’s a 63 percent chance that the Championship 4 will roll on without any representation from the trio of Reddick, Elliott and Blaney. There’s also a 35 percent chance that only one of the three will drive for a title, and just a 2.5 percent chance for two of them to advance. (Exactly zero times in 10,000 simulations did all three take the three vacant non-Logano spots in the Final Four.)
In other words, our defending champ (Blaney), the sport’s most popular driver (Elliott), and the regular-season champion (Reddick) are quite possibly already screwed after just one race in the Round of 8. Life comes at you fast — and never faster than when you’re traveling around a track at 200 mph.
Filed under: NASCAR, NASCAR Playoff Odds