It’s Time for NASCAR to Scrap the Win-and-in Playoff System

Austin Dillon was responding to incentives that need to change.

Austin Dillon (#3) takes the checkered flag at Richmond after wrecking Joey Logano and Denny Hamlin. (Logan Whitton/Getty Images)

Desperation makes people do crazy things sometimes.

That’s how I would explain Austin Dillon’s choices on the final lap of Sunday’s Cook Out 400 at Richmond, which saw Dillon win after plowing through the back of race leader Joey Logano — then hooking the rear end of Denny Hamlin — to keep either from taking the checkered flag instead of him:

Dillon did what he did because he was watching his playoff hopes slip away in real time. He is in the midst of his second consecutive terrible season, a trend that has consistently landed him on my “most disappointing driver” rankings, and he went into Richmond ranked 32nd in the points with zero chance of making the playoffs if he didn’t grab a W.

Dillon also spent most of Sunday driving one of the best races of his Cup Series career, with an average running position of 6th place and a 116.6 driver rating. He was en route to winning the easy way, until Ricky Stenhouse Jr. spun Ryan Preece with fewer than 2 laps to go to set up overtime. And so, after getting beat by Logano on the restart, seeing his best chance at a win (or the playoffs) in years evaporate — and maybe his long-term future in the sport with it — Dillon threw caution, and sportsmanship, to the wind.

“I hate it, but I had to do it,” Dillon said afterwards.

Or, as the racing YouTuber Eric Estepp said Sunday night: “Don’t hate the player, hate the format.”

I wrote a few years ago that NASCAR’s playoff system was too obsessed with winning for its own good. Dillon’s response to that obsession on Sunday — what Logano called a “chickenshit move” (and he wasn’t alone) — was the natural way such a system was always going to play out.

Starting in 2014, the playoffs were expanded to 16 drivers and they effectively guaranteed each race winner from the regular season a place in the postseason, as long as the number of unique winners didn’t exceed 16.¹ The change was touted as a way to raise the stakes for each race, putting the heaviest of emphases on something any fan can get excited for: Wins.

"We have arrived at a format that makes every race matter even more, diminishes points racing, plus puts a premium on winning races, and concludes with a best-of-the-best, first to the finish line showdown race -- all of which is exactly what fans want," said then-NASCAR Chairman and CEO Brian France at the time.

But the downside is that a driver like Dillon can perform terribly most every race of the season, yet still make the playoffs with one frantic, desperate dash to the finish line. (It would be like the Arizona Cardinals automatically making the NFL playoffs last year because they beat the Philadelphia Eagles in Week 17.) If a system rewards singular highs over week-to-week consistency, the competitors who need to will adopt a go-for-broke strategy to take advantage.

This kind of system, while creating exciting moments in theory, is broken in practice — not only because of its bad incentives, but because it lets inferior drivers into the postseason.

We can see this if we compare the drivers since 2014 who made the playoffs via winning, but wouldn’t have if the rankings were determined by the old Winston Cup-style points system. In the 10 seasons from 2014-23, 20 drivers — or an average of two per year — fit that description, which means 20 other drivers missed out compared with an alternate universe where wins were not so heavily prioritized. Here’s a comparison of the pre-playoff stats for both groups:

Aside from (obviously) wins and a very slight edge in Top 5s per driver, the group who missed the playoffs with zero wins — but otherwise would have made it on points — had much better regular-season metrics than the group who made the playoffs via winning: They had more poles and Top 10s, were running at the end of races more often, had a better average start and average finish, and a better Adjusted Points+ Index.

In other words, the policy of putting race winners above all others has, paradoxically, led to a worse group of drivers making the playoffs.

Dillon will contribute to this trend, too. With three races to go in the regular season, his current Pts+ index of 67 is tracking to be the second-worst by any playoff driver heading into the postseason during the 16-entry era, trailing only Chris Buescher’s 56 Pts+ index in 2016:

(This isn’t exactly the first time Dillon has been in the “worst playoff drivers” conversation, either, but his 2024 performance is an order of magnitude worse than the other times he snuck into the playoffs with a below-average season.)

Certainly, NASCAR has gone through a lot of formats and championship systems over the years, and in some ways the current focus on wins was a direct response to the outcry over Matt Kenseth claiming the 2003 championship despite winning fewer races than nine other drivers — including Ryan Newman, who had eight times as many wins (!) as Kenseth did.

But if that represented the pendulum swinging too far in the “wins-don’t-matter” direction, the current situation with Dillon is exposing just how far things have swung the other way. A simple compromise would be to base the standings on points again, but just weigh wins — or high finishes in general — more heavily than the scoring does now.

At the moment, points are scaled linearly from second place through 36th place, with wins getting a measly four extra points (or the difference between second and sixth) compared with what we would expect from the rest of the curve. Or, put another way, winning is only twice as good as finishing 17th. An elegant fix for this would be to decay points along an exponential function as finishes get worse, which would naturally put a lot more emphasis on winning races, but not arbitrarily lock out non-winners if they perform well enough.

(This is the entire premise behind my Adjusted Points system, which diminishes scoring along a steeper curve at the high end of finishes, such that winning is worth 5.1 times as much as finishing 17th — a far more reasonable ratio.)

Adopting this type of system wouldn’t change very much in the bigger picture: From 2014-23, only 17 drivers who made the playoffs in reality wouldn’t have if we purely ranked qualified drivers off of total Adjusted Points. But the quality of the drivers who got in (127 Pts+) would be far superior to those who got bumped out (101 Pts+). And while winning would certainly carry a heavy mathematical bonus under the exponential points curve, the incentives wouldn’t be quite so clear-cut as to lead Dillon’s spotter to yell “wreck him!!” as his driver hooked Hamlin into the wall.

As things stand now, Dillon both does and doesn’t deserve the criticism being hurled his way today. He ran a great race, which was potentially spoiled at the end by Stenhouse and Preece (for no good reason). He made a desperate decision to beat Logano and Hamlin, in keeping with the incentives of NASCAR’s playoff system. He also showcased the worst sportsmanship that the sport has to offer.

But in the end, he won. Unless things change with this format in the future — as they should — that’s all that really matters with the playoffs on the line.

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Filed under: NASCAR

1. Along with other provisions such as needing to finish among the Top 30 overall in points and attempting to qualify for all of the other points races that season.