Scott Fowler: New Sprint Cup format adds much-needed drama to final race

As is the case almost every year in college basketball’s Final Four, the last quartet standing in NASCAR is not what you would have expected.

In the first year of the sport’s new playoff format, Kevin Harvick, Joey Logano, Denny Hamlin and Ryan Newman enter Sunday’s final race dead even.

The best finisher among those four in that race – whether any of them win it or not – will claim the 2014 championship.

“There are no points anymore,” Hamlin said. “You can swing for the fences.”

None of these four have won a Sprint Cup title. This is a Final Four with major intrigue and minor star power.

If this was college basketball, all of the No. 1 seeds would be gone. No Duke, no North Carolina, no Kentucky, no UCLA. You know that person in your office who knows nothing about basketball but once won the office pool by picking winners based on uniform colors? That person would love this final four.

These drivers have more in common with Gonzaga or Butler – sustained excellence at times, but no national championships.

But it’s certainly not their fault that there’s no Jimmie Johnson or Jeff Gordon, no “Bad Brad” Keselowski, no Tony Stewart and no Busch brother in the last group. Playing by the new rules of the game – in which the championship field began with 16 drivers and lopped four off every three races – Harvick, Logano, Hamlin and Newman survived and scraped their way almost to the top.

All that remains is today’s race to decide the title.

“This new format is the best thing that has happened to our sport in as long as I can remember,” Harvick said at a news conference featuring each of the final four drivers in Miami Wednesday. “It’s simple enough that fans can follow along, and the past nine races have been as good as any I’ve ever been a part of.”

I would agree with that. There have been postrace scuffles. There have been wrecks galore. There has been controversy. There was Harvick on Wednesday ribbing Logano – repeatedly – about something that happened at Talladega earlier this season.

In other words, it’s just about exactly what NASCAR wanted when it rolled out its latest tweaks to its playoff format in 2014.

But even with the new emphasis on winning, it’s not perfect. Newman, for instance, hasn’t won a race all year and has only led a handful of laps yet has managed to get into the final four by virtue of consistently staying out of major trouble. Hamlin has only won once but made it, too. Harvick and Logano, on the other hand, have won multiple times in 2014 (Harvick four wins, Logano five) but still go in with no advantage in the final race.

“We’re all in the same boat Sunday,” said Logano, who at 24 is the youngest of the final four. “It’s going to be entertaining.”

With the emphasis primarily on beating the other three today, it’s quite conceivable that one of the four will wreck somebody else near the end of the race if the championship is on the line. Newman did exactly that to make the field last week, taking a spot away from Gordon in the process. Harvick said undoubtedly they will all “do what we have to do, and deal with the repercussions later.”

Many previous season finales at Homestead have often seemed to be Sunday drives with the accelerator set on cruise control – especially some of those times when six-time champ Jimmie Johnson had such a commanding lead that about all he had to do to win is not wreck.

Not today. The new format guarantees drama. And if the first nine races of these NASCAR playoffs are any indication, it will be a fun ride.