NASCAR's tight regular-season battle proves it doesn't need playoffs to create championship fight

Ask almost any longtime NASCAR Cup Series fan about the circuit's greatest championship battle of all time, and they likely won't name a season from 2014 to the present day.

Sure, NASCAR's current knockout-style, "win-and-you're-in" playoff format has produced plenty of compelling moments, but the forced "Game 7" races and the decreasing legitimacy of the championship have soured fans toward a format that was never really needed in the first place.

With five races remaining in NASCAR's regular season, the top four drivers in points — Chase Elliott, Kyle Larson, Tyler Reddick and Denny Hamlin — are separated by just 20 points, with the top 10 in points only separated by 107 points. With consistency being the main factor in a driver being in contention for the regular-season title, there's no doubt the top four have been the best all season.

When NASCAR first introduced the "Chase for the Nextel Cup" in 2004, it hoped it would provide the tightly contested points battle playing out in 2024. It also served as the precursor to NASCAR's current system, a test run of sorts to gauge fan interest in a down-to-the-wire championship on a yearly basis.

The original Chase certainly had its fair share of moments — Tony Stewart and Carl Edwards' 2011 heavyweight fight sticks out as the Chase's magnum opus — but the 10-race battle at the end of the season still diminished the season-long accomplishments of drivers who raced consistently well.

For 54 years, NASCAR proved it didn't need a playoff format to decide its champion. While the points formats in the first 20 years of the sport hardly made any sense, the season-long Winston Cup format finally proved to have the most staying power, and only a ridiculously consistent, one-win season by Matt Kenseth in 2003 could convince NASCAR that the way it decided a champion needed to change.

Here's the problem, though: To drum up excitement around the final 10 races of the season, NASCAR accidentally neutered the excitement of the first 26. With one win locking a driver into the playoffs, there's nothing stopping that team from experimenting until the postseason rolls around, a strategy Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus employed en route to five straight titles from 2006 to 2010.

While 15 crucial playoff points are on the line for Elliott, Larson, Reddick and Hamlin should they win the regular-season crown, a poor pair of races could see them out the playoff door after the first round.

With four drivers going for the title in a winner-take-all bout in Race 36 every season, NASCAR has manufactured the excitement of its championship race.

Races such as the 1992 Hooters 500 at Atlanta, however, prove that a complicated points format isn't necessary to produce a championship battle that comes down to the final lap.

That race at Atlanta was the season finale for arguably the greatest season of NASCAR racing ever, with six drivers having a chance to win the title when the green flag flew. In the end, it was Wisconsinite Alan Kulwicki who took the Cup by the slimmest of margins — 10 points was the difference between Kulwicki and second-place Bill Elliott.

The story of Kulwicki's nail-biting 1992 championship run remains special because it didn't happen every year. NASCAR still had an exciting championship battle nearly every season, but when it didn't, it was because the organization cherished the opportunity to watch a driver crush his competition for an entire season.

The championship is still the ultimate goal in NASCAR racing, but the luster, legitimacy and intrigue of of it have steadily fallen because of the sanctioning body's failure to recognize something crucial: If excitement is obviously manufactured, it's not that intriguing.