Joe Gibbs Racing's Denny Hamlin was well on his way to winning the 2025 NASCAR Cup Series championship on Sunday at Phoenix Raceway when an unnecessary caution flag was thrown with just over two laps remaining.
Despite holding off on the caution flag for several other tire failures throughout the weekend, NASCAR needed their Game 7 moment, and William Byron's tire failure conveniently came at a time that kept the very individual who is suing the sanctioning body from cruising to a long-awaited first championship.
Hamlin came into the pits and took four tires, allowing Hendrick Motorsports' Kyle Larson, who took two, to restart five spots ahead of him. Hamlin could only come within three spots of the No. 5 Chevrolet, and Larson was crowned champion on a day Hamlin led 208 of 319 laps from pole around the four-turn, 1.022-mile (1.645-kilometer) Avondale, Arizona oval.
Larson, on the other hand, became just the second driver in the 12-year history of the modern knockout playoff format to win the championship without winning the season finale.
He was also the only one of the four championship eligible drivers who didn't lead a single lap, and he was still crowned champion.
"We didn't lead a lap and won the championship," Larson said after the race in what was a relatively subdued championship interview, compared to many, if not all, we've seen in the past.
If that isn't the nail in the coffin for NASCAR's modern playoff format, I don't know what is.
Additionally, all three of the other title contenders have won a race in the past three and a half weeks. Larson hasn't won a race since May, and quite frankly, hasn't looked the same since his second consecutive ill-fated Memorial Day Double attempt.
A format that is ironically viewed as flawed for how much value it places on winning somehow allowed one of the most mediocre performers of the second half of the year to win the championship on a day when he was basically a non-factor to cap off a winless postseason.
What more can you say?
The good thing about it all is that Larson, among the so-called "undeserving" champions of the playoff era, is definitely the most deserving. He did lead the series in points over the course of all 36 races, so as much as he backed into the title itself with an all-time embarrassing sequence of events, he didn't really back into it if we zoom out and focus on more than just two laps.
A further irony, though, is the fact that he won because of Byron's tire failure, and it was that very same tire failure that actually robbed Byron of the full-season points lead. Larson only finished 14 points ahead, and he would have finished roughly 20 or 25 points behind.
In other words, no matter what format is used, being at the right place at the right time sometimes matters more than anything else, even for a driver as good as Larson has become. And that's apparently true whether it's a random race in the middle of June or the season finale in early November.