Dale Earnhardt Jr. is fed up with current NASCAR Playoff, offers fix for crowning true champion

Dale Earnhardt Jr. wants to see big changes with the current NASCAR playoff. On Dale Jr. Download, Earnhardt revealed what he would change about the playoffs, and it starts with the Daytona 500.

“What if we got rid of the regular season, and starting in Daytona with the Daytona 500, the playoffs began?” Dale Earnhardt Jr. asked. “The playoffs are the whole season ending with a final one-round championship round, or a three or four-race championship round.

“Instead of this eight, four rounds and eliminate a few guys and all that, make the regular season feel like the playoffs. The problem with what we have right now is that when the season begins, there’s not a lot of urgency. In the old system, a bad race was damning on your championship hopes. So, Week 2, Week 4, a bad run, a broken engine or whatever, you felt that s**t.”

Dale Earnhardt Jr. says eliminating the NASCAR playoff is ‘not off the table’

Earnhardt added, “We don’t feel that anymore. Guys get out, they don’t give a f**k. They’re going to come back next week with a chance to make the playoffs. Every week is another chance to punch your ticket and go into the playoffs, regardless of what kind of season you had. What we have lost as a sport is the agony of defeat. … The peaks and the valleys have kind of been neutralized. We don’t have those heartbreakers, and the highs aren’t as high anymore.”

Dale Earnhardt Jr. also talked about how “a lot of people want to go back to the original format,” where there wasn’t a playoff system. “It’s not off the table entirely,” he said. “It has a very tiny percent chance of actually happening. Near zero. But it is in the conversation, and I like that, it’s a healthy debate of saying, ‘Look, we’re probably never going to go back to this original, but let’s discuss the merits, the positives of it and why did we go away from it.'”

During the offseason, there was a debate about NASCAR changing the playoff format after Joey Logano won the Cup Series title for the third time in his career. Logano finished ninth and got through the playoffs due to winning three races (including the Championship 4) and a disqualification of Alex Bowman that promoted him to the Round of 8.