It was all smiles for Todd Gilliland and the No. 34 Front Row Motorsports team as they collected their 24th Place Driver of the Year Trophy at Indianapolis Motor Speedway following Sunday's Brickyard 400.
Gilliland won the second annual NASCAR In-Season Challenge tournament by finishing two spots ahead of Team Penske's Ryan Blaney in 26th.
Blaney still almost managed to win, despite having taking damage after being involved in a multi-car wreck, which just about perfectly illustrates what this tournament has become.
We're not taking anything away from Gilliland and the No. 34 team. They did what they needed to do and won by the same rules everyone else was forced to play by.
But what they needed to do differed from what anybody else needed to do. The average finish of Gilliland's opponents during the five-week stretch of tournament races was 23.6, with nothing higher than 17th. Gilliland himself only averaged a finish of 19.2.
You almost feel bad for Gilliland, in that he gets to be the poster child for why the tournament is ridiculous, because all he did was have about the five most standard, uneventful, and average weeks he and the No. 34 team could have possibly had. And now they get a trophy and a $1 million prize for basically showing up. More power to them.
Perhaps we should have expected another celebration of mediocrity after what happened a year ago. Ty Gibbs, who had zero career wins at the time (like Gilliland), won it with a 21st place finish at Indy, and he did so by beating Ty Dillon, who was the lowest seeded driver in the 32-driver tournament.
The problem is that nobody is allowed to criticize the nonsense that the In-Season Gimmick is. After 20+ years of gimmicks, nobody seems to realize that these wacky initiatives are not actually putting more eyeballs on the sport. Not playoffs, not stages, and certainly not these random head-to-heads and manufactured drama in the middle of summer.
Making a mockery of it? Sure. But not much else.
If NASCAR insists on keeping this challenge, there's a very simple fix. Take the top drivers each week, with no head-to-head matchups.
Why? Because we've already seen how useless "seeding" is. NASCAR simply needs to stop trying to be the NCAA tournament or the NFL playoffs.
You can still have 32 drivers. Take the top 16 of those 32 after the first round and move them to the second round. Take the top eight of those 16 in the second round and move them to the quarterfinals, and so on. Get rid of head-to-head randomness.
You'd still have upsets. You'd still have contenders dropping out, and you'd still have drivers posting great results after having unfortunately already been eliminated.
But you'd lose the possibility for a 29th place finish to be "good enough" just because it's better than a 30th, while at the same time a fifth place finish isn't good enough simply because it's not better than a fourth.
Right now, you have a tournament where a driver can post a runner-up finish and then four straight wins, and not even make it past the first round. In the meantime, a driver can finish 35th every week and win the whole thing.
It's basically designed so that somebody who isn't a usual contender should win.
While the likelihood of those two extremes ever coming to fruition is admittedly small, the fact that just one of the four finalists from 2025 and 2026 entered the "championship" round with more than zero career victories, and neither "championship" took a top 20 finish to win, shows we're already closer to that than anyone would have wanted or expected.
The only individuals not pointing to the tournament concept and laughing are those who are quite literally not allowed to criticize it. Of course TNT Sports isn't going to say anything negative about it when they're responsible for broadcasting all five races of it. Of course they're going to talk about how much the fans allegedly love an underdog story.
And maybe some do.
But after two years, it's pretty obvious that, at least in its current form, it has run its course and then some. It was worth trying, and it was worth trying again after the 2025 edition produced a mid-off championship round.
Now it's a complete joke, and as far as spicing up the season goes, it doesn't serve much of a purpose now that the old playoff format is gone. Absolutely nobody is tuning in because they're intrigued by these matchups, the same way nobody would watch a New York Jets game in mid-October just because the NFL decided it was sort of like an in-season Super Bowl.
