Joey Logano gives his thoughts on the current NASCAR Playoff format and the tough road it creates to be crowned champion.
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00:00Winston Cup purists are out in full force tonight, as you might imagine, and I'm curious, you know, they say, well, 17.4 average finish, or whatever it is, right?
00:10And he's not a real champion. Is there anything you would say to that subset of the fan base?
00:15No. No. I got nothing to say to them. I got a pretty sweet trophy right now. I've been laughing all the way to the bank.
00:27And the only reason I thought you might have something to say is that you came in here yesterday and you said that you wanted to come in today and step on everyone's throat.
00:36And at the time, I thought that was kind of bold because the thing in sports is always you don't give the other team bulletin board material.
00:44So is there any part of you or Paul or RP that's like, Joey, you shouldn't do that? And do you feel any sort of trepidation in making such a bold declaration like that?
00:53I told you I work better under pressure. I got to put pressure on myself. And, you know, that's one of the ways that the race never the race started weeks ago.
01:03Right. And in here is part of the race. So it it never stops. And, you know, to your point about, you know, championships and what it is.
01:16The only reason why they don't say this about other sports is because they didn't change the playoff system. But their playoff system in other sports is not much different than what this is.
01:25You can have a great regular season. It sees you better for the playoffs. Right now, that doesn't mean you're guaranteed to go all the way to Super Bowl or the Stanley Cup finals or the NBA finals.
01:37It doesn't matter. It might help you. And it's the same way in NASCAR. The way we have the rules now is that you set yourself up much better. Right.
01:47You look at the way we came into the playoffs versus the five, the forty five guys that scored, you know, 15 playoff points for winning the regular season championship.
01:57That's three wins worth of points in three races. That's hard to make up that amount of points. And they have the same opportunity to go out there and win and move on to the next round.
02:07So for someone to say this isn't real, it's a bunch of in my opinion, that's wrong. This is this is something that everyone knows the rules when the season starts.
02:17And, you know, we figured out how to do it the best and figured out how to win. It's what our team's been able to do for the last three years.
02:27So I don't like people talking that way. You know what I mean? Because if the rules were the old way, we would play it out differently, wouldn't we?
02:38So I just think that's just a bunch of hearsay back there and people have just got to accept what the times are. Times change. Right.
02:45And I don't know if you have a lot of the moments that we have today with without the playoff system that we have. Right.
02:56Like, do you want to see the championship crown with three races to go? Because that's what used to happen. That's pretty boring.
03:04You got do or die moments. You get the pressure. You got all these things going on in the last 10 weeks. You have guys trying to get into the playoffs.
03:10You have that storyline. Gosh, I mean, how many storylines can we make? It's amazing. Right.
03:14I mean, like for people to complain, it makes me mad. It makes me so frustrated to hear that because, golly, man, it is awesome.
03:22Like remove. I watched the Xfinity series, obviously in the truck series, and it's hard for me to talk about the Cup series because I'm in it.
03:29But I watched those races as a fan, whether it's from the booth or it's or it's just on TV like I did last night.
03:35That's entertaining stuff. Like I'm glued to my TV, especially a lot more during the playoffs than I am during a regular season.
03:44What's wrong with that? Like, golly, man, I don't know. Makes me mad. Sorry. I'm not sorry.