The Chase renders the regular season meaningless, more news

Kyle Busch lost 80 bonus points in the first race of the Chase. Getty Images

MOORESVILLE, N.C. -- So after the first race of the Chase, it is apparent that Jimmie Johnson picked the right time of the season to be at the top of his game, while Kyle Busch could not have picked a worse time to falter.

That is the danger of this 12-driver, 10-race process that determines the NASCAR Sprint Cup champion. Busch threw away his 80 bonus points in one day and with a 34th-place finish following a miserable drive that included spin outs, a broken Heim Joint and other maladies, Busch is now 74 points out of the lead with nine races remaining.

While there is plenty of time left in NASCAR's Chase for Busch to pedal his way back to the front, once again it shows just how meaningless the 26-race exercise known as the "regular season" can be to the driver who enters the Chase atop the standings.

Busch looked unstoppable at the end of the regular season with a 203-point lead over Carl Edwards, but that was all but wiped out when the points were reset for the 12 drivers that are in the Chase, leaving Busch with a 30-point lead over Edwards.

Jeff Gordon discovered that last year and Johnson suffered the same fate in 2004 and '05. They all had healthy leads in the standings wiped out when the Chase began and ultimately watched another driver celebrate the title. The same scenario could easily happen to Busch this year. Consider that the No. 1 seed in the Chase has won the championship just once.

Suddenly, eight victories and a confident swagger don't look so good for the driver who was leaving his competitors in his exhaust fumes for most of the season. But, this is the way NASCAR wants it.

When they came up with the innovative, although far too contrived, plan to determine the season champion beginning with the 2004 season, they wanted to have more drivers battling for the Cup title. In theory, they would like to see seven or more drivers have a legitimate chance of winning the championship heading into the final race of the season.

After all, the team with the best record in the National Football League doesn't always win the Super Bowl -- just ask the New England Patriots about that.

But those sports have a legitimate "playoff" format where teams are involved in an elimination tournament where teams are seeded. Once a team is eliminated, they are out of contention.

But in NASCAR's Chase format, the teams still alive for the championship are still competing against the other 31 teams that missed the cut in the regular season.

So a Chad McCumbee can still have an impact on Matt Kenseth's championship run as that actually happened on Sunday at New Hampshire late in the race in a six-car crash that brought out the red flag and put Kenseth out of the race.

Give NASCAR credit for trying to infuse some interest in a points system that sometimes resulted in a "Ho-Hum" points race, such as 2003, when Kenseth won the title with one victory.

But if Dale Earnhardt Jr. had won the 2003 Cup title with no victories, would NASCAR have felt the same urgency to change how a champion is determined? I highly doubt it.

NASCAR's Chase was a huge success in its first year when five drivers all had a chance at winning the title in the final race before Kurt Busch ultimately prevailed in 2004. But since then, one or two drivers have sped out of the gates and left the rest of the Chasers behind as Gordon virtually conceded any hope of winning the title to Johnson after the Phoenix race last year with one race remaining.

NASCAR has been successful in selling the Chase to the media. It becomes part of the sports vocabulary as soon as the checkered flag drops at the Daytona 500 in February.

But the one group that hasn't embraced the Chase is the most important constituency of all -- the race fans.

Most of the people that attend a Sprint Cup race are there to see if Earnhardt Jr. is going to win the race and if he can't, then they will pick another driver to cheer on to the checkered flag or boo if they get in "Junior's way." They are there to watch the race not calculate who is leading the Chase.

Last year before the October race at Talladega, I decided to sneak out of the press box and find an empty seat in the open-air grandstands at the tri-oval, to catch the full force of the start of the race. While I sat in the stands, I listened in to what some of the fans were saying, not letting them know that I was an eavesdropping member of the media.

"I don't buy into this whole idea of taking away points from a man who earned them in the regular season," one fan said to his friend. "That just ain't right. Look what they did to Jeff Gordon. They took 365 points away from him at the start of the Chase. Now that just ain't right to take points away from the man like that."

Now remember, these were race fans at Talladega, Alabama -- not exactly a bastion of sympathy for Jeff Gordon. In fact, they would rather throw beer bottles at the No. 24 Chevrolet than bouquets of roses.

So now, Kyle Busch finds himself in a similar scenario. Stripped of his once-mighty points lead and thanks to a bad race to start the Chase he feels urgency for the first time all season.

It means that suddenly, he can envision another driver hoisting the Sprint Cup trophy at the end of the Chase after a season where he was seemingly in firm control.