There are no two ways about it: Joey Logano is, and always will be, the 2024 NASCAR Cup Series champion.
He made it to the playoffs by winning a race at Nashville Superspeedway. He advanced to the next round with another win at Atlanta Motor Speedway. He advanced to the next round after another team screwed up and got themselves disqualified. And he advanced to the Championship 4 after another win at Las Vegas Motor Speedway when he rolled the dice on fuel strategy.
He then won the championship with a dominant victory at Phoenix Raceway.
In any sport, championships are earned, not deserved. And no driver not named Logano earned the 2024 championship. Not Kyle Larson, not William Byron, not Christopher Bell; nobody.
That said, the fact that it was Logano, who ended the regular season 15th in points and would not have even come remotely close to getting into the playoffs on points had he not held off Zane Smith, of all people, in a five-overtime race at Nashville has led to the loudest calls ever for a playoff format change.
Even with his stellar playoff run, he didn't finish the season inside the top 10 in total points scored. The "A-game" comment from Elton Sawyer is still totally laughable, made more so by the fact that, in four of the nine playoff races leading up to the title decider, Logano was competing for absolutely nothing. And his average finish in those four races was outside the top 20.
The current knockout playoff format has been in place since 2014. There are all kinds of proposals each year about how the format can be changed, the but the simple reality of it is that no matter what changes are made (if any), there will be further complaints that the system isn't fair.
Even a season-long points format would be gimmicky at this point, considering the fact that stage racing opens up the possibility that the race winner doesn't score the most points in a race. And it happens a lot more often than you'd think.
Logano is off to the worst start of his stint with Team Penske, which began in 2013, and his start is by far the worst for any reigning champion of the playoff era. Six races into the season, he has yet to record a top 10 finish.
But let's stop pretending to be surprised about that.
He's performing at a very similar level to the level at which he performed throughout the entire regular season last year, when he finished inside the top 10 in fewer than one-third of the races.
He and the No. 22 team know what matters in this playoff format, and good finishes in March mean nothing in the "win and in" and "win and advance" era of the postseason.
Even his 13th place finish at Phoenix a few weeks ago, a race which most teams with championship aspirations viewed as the regular season's most important, historically means absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of championship deciders, as hard as that may be to believe.
Among eventual Championship 4 drivers, the leader in the March Phoenix race has never gone on to win the title since Phoenix started hosting the championship race in 2020.
At the end of the day, there is probably not an individual in the NASCAR garage who cares less about his early season struggles than Logano. And nobody should be surprised.
And speaking of the whole "stick and ball sports" argument we hear whenever the great playoff debate comes up (so pretty much every week), it may interest fans to know that, for six years in a row, the eventual Super Bowl champion has lost to a team in the regular season that they ended up beating in the playoffs.
All he has to do is win a race, and he's in the playoffs. And if he gets in, anything can happen from there. With three championships in the last seven years, despite having never led the series in total points over a full season, nobody knows how to make this format work to his advantage better than Logano does.
He may not even need to do that; he is still surprisingly in 11th place in the standings, which is better than his best finish (and ironically better than his championship season...), thanks to his abundance of stage points. He is already 30 points above the playoff cut line, even without a top 10 finish.
As they say in sports, don't hate the player; hate the game. Nobody knows the game better than Logano. And amid a six-race stretch in which his average finish is 18.83, it's about time fans figured that out.