NASCAR fans show blatant hypocrisy (again) with laughable Southern 500 reaction

The Southern 500 has always been one of NASCAR's "crown jewel" events, given its historic prestige. In recent years, it's become even more special now that it is, along with fellow crown jewel Coca-Cola 600, one of only two non-superspeedway races on the Cup Series schedule with a distance of 500 miles or longer.

That said, it's still occasionally prone to having one driver dominate from start to finish, and this was the case on Sunday evening. Chase Briscoe won both stages, led 309 of 367 laps, and held off Tyler Reddick, Erik Jones, and John Hunter Nemechek in a finish that went green for the final 48 circuits.

It was everything NASCAR fans claim they want: a fair, natural battle to the checkers with the guy who deserved it the most coming out on top.

So, naturally, the response to Jeff Gluck's weekly "good race" poll was that it was one of the worst Darlington events in years.

Darlington once again exposes how NASCAR fans really feel, and it's not what they'll want to hear

There are only two possible explanations for why Sunday's race scored so low, the first one having already been mentioned in that Briscoe was just too good.

It's funny: for a fanbase that spends all day every week clamoring for a season-long points system in which it's okay if a driver runs away with the title because they earned it the most, none of this same logic ever applies to the actual races themselves.

If someone with an average finish of 15th wins the championship by stringing together a few victories at opportune times, then it's a disgrace to the sport.

But if a caution comes out in a race with 10 laps to go, the dominant driver loses the lead on pit road, and then the field collectively throws away their brains, leading to multiple overtimes and a guy who was running 15th beforehand backing into the win, then that's just part of the name of the game.

Had this happened on Sunday, we all know the poll would've come out at least 70%, probably higher. Everyone will tell you how much they hate "gimmicks" such as stage cautions, overtime, and double-file restarts that artificially spice up races, but when a race has a long green-flag run to the end, they don't like that either.

The other excuse, of course, will be that nobody could pass. Newsflash: welcome to Darlington, where it has always been hard to pass. In fact, Sunday's finish felt like a virtual mirror image of that of the 2021 Southern 500, when Denny Hamlin held off Kyle Larson and Ross Chastain despite being the slowest of the three during the final 36-lap dash. That race scored above 90 percent.

So, what gives? Oh, wait: that race was run with the 750 horsepower Gen 6 package, which made it all okay. The love affair with the 750hp package was so ridiculous that fans would intentionally manipulate Gluck's poll by predetermining their response based on if a race was run using it, or using the hated 550hp package that the Gen 6 also ran between 2019 and 2021.

The Next Gen car, like the 550hp package, has been deemed bad and evil with no hope of salvation, so no race where passing is even remotely difficult will ever get the benefit of the doubt.

Anyway, Briscoe had no problems getting the lead back from both Hamlin and Tyler Reddick after losing it on a pair of separate restarts, but that doesn't fit the narrative.

Again, sometimes a guy is just better than everybody else, as Briscoe was on Sunday. Yet for as much as fans talk about how they want to see purity and fairness on the track, their own actions prove otherwise.