I'm with Paul on this one, Pomona should be wild next year for the Finals. I think the new format will add alot of excitement, as well as controversy to the sport, but it will be exciting, and everyone will be tuned in to see it all.........
How many Football fans do we have in the house? And how do you guys feel about the way their titles are earned? Should Indy have been the champs last year, or is it okay that Pittsburg snuck in at the last minute (Leaker) then handed Indy their butts on a platter, and then went on to win it all. Indy had ONE BAD WEEKEND, then it was all over.
How about College Football, how about that Championship, that's a can of worms.
This petition is useless, if NHRA were to go on record and reverse this format back to the old, they would be the laughing stock of all Professional Sports. It is now a playoff system, like every other major sport in the world, learn to enjoy it for what it is.
NBA basketball just reversed a decision mid season regarding their ball and are being hailed for actually listening.
I'll try to give my brief answer
The football comparison- First when the playoffs start in a couple of weeks we will see the bears and saints play a playoff game against each other, they will not have to worry about the Packers and Lions, non playoff teams, competing on the same field at the same time. In Drag racing's version we will have playoff and non playoff teams competing. Does anyone remember the first year of nascar's chase when a non chase racer crashed and took out I believe 2 of the chase racers. Even this year, non chase racers admiteed that they did not race as hard for fear of taking someone out who is in the hunt. Is that not basically throwing a race, where's the interity in the championship then? People complain about team orders now, I can just imagine how much worse it will get under the new system. Do you take a light light against your teammate, family member or good friend?
Also when that playoff game starts the score is 0-0 rather then the 10 point incriment that we will see now.
Also in football there are 32 teams, yet teams play a 16 game schedule with 2 games against 3 teams twice. This mean in a season you only play 13 different teams. You need a playoff from their to determine who is the champ. Does the best team always win, no. We could argue that the best team doesn't win in drag racing now. Who was better this year Troxel, Shoe or Doug?? Each had great streaks with Tony running the best in the end but Doug had 2 more round wins and Capps won more races than Force .
In drag racing, the contenders are gonna run into each other eventually, ya know good old head to head combat, lets decide it on the track. Under the new system it takes away the imporance of the entire season and boils it down to a couple of races. Under this new system Herbert would have finsihed 2nd last year, all becasue of a few good races at the end. To me that is not right, the beauty and draw of drag racing, beyond the sights and sound, is that everything on the track matters. The winternationals is just as important as the Finals. In hockey you always here people say that the playoffs don't matter. That is what will happen now. Why race you butt off to get a 200 point lead when its only going to be 10 come Indy. I can see teams taking it easy, playing it safe with parts and budget just to make the great 8 then going nuts from their with their budgets.
Going in Indy this year 3 out of the 4 classes had a losing record in 8th place. Not championship caliber in my book.
TV ratings- This is a rip off of nascars failing system. In a recent poll almost 60% of nascars fans want to go back to their old system, another 20+% want changes and less than 20% want to keep it as it is. This is after 5 years. The tv ratings of nascars show this as well.
After an initial spike the first year they have declined every year since they started their chase. This year they saw double digit % loses in the chase races comapred to last year. The chase races also scored lower than their "regular season" races. We do not have the numbers nascar does, we can not afford to have such loses that this system will bring. If we do then we will no longer see nhra on tv, or at least not in the same day capacity that we do now.
Another side note to the nascar system, this years chase was so exciting
that all you had to do was average a 10th place finish to win the championship.
I want to know that at the end of the season the person on the stage is one who earned it and deserved it. I fear next year that this will not be the case.
Part of what made this last 2 seasons special was that they are special. We have years where Force or Anderson or whoemever just blows everyone away and thats fine, that makes me appreciate seasons like this even more. If I know only the last couple of races matter now, why bother wathcing the first 3/4 quarters of the season?
Ok I've already went longer than I meant to, I'll take a breath now
