For the second consecutive year, the NASCAR Cup Series ran its million-dollar In-Season Challenge to provide some extra excitement to the dog days of the regular season. And for the second consecutive year, it was hard to take it seriously as any sort of test of elite performance.
In 2025, it was Ty Dillon making it to the final round as the 32nd and lowest-seeded driver in the field, by doing nothing besides watching his competition fall victim to the bad luck bug. This time, Todd Gilliland went one step further by actually winning the whole thing, thanks to John Hunter Nemechek spinning Ryan Blaney at Indianapolis Motor Speedway.
Gilliland's finishes during the tournament? 29th, 16th, 19th, eighth, and 24th.
Todd Gilliland just gave us another all-time case study about "consistency" in NASCAR
For the past 12 years, NASCAR fans have endlessly bashed the series' former playoff format because you could theoretically win 35 of 36 races, finish second in the last race, and lose the championship. With the In-Season Challenge tournament, it's even worse. You can hypothetically win by finishing next-to-last for five straight weeks, as long as your opponent comes in behind you.
Gilliland didn't quite do that, but his average result of 19.2 in the five events is closer to the back of a standard 36-car field than the front. Yet none of it mattered, because his opponents came in 31st, 22nd, 22nd, 17th, and 26th, respectively.
Ultimately, the tournament means nothing aside from a fat paycheck and some cute storylines while everybody is just counting down the days until the Chase for the Cup begins. Still, it goes to show the dangers of building any competition around the illusion of "consistency", which is a worthless quality when it comes at any level below excellence.
Where the In-Season tournament is concerned, it will always reward minimizing loss instead of maximizing gain, because it is far easier for luck to influence results in a negative way than a positive one. As was proven by Blaney on Sunday, one bad finish due to unavoidable circumstances will kill you. But five simply passable ones? You win!
At the end of the day, Gilliland did what he had to do, and he can't be faulted for it. But just in case anybody was treating this tournament as anything more than a gimmick, we can officially put that to bed. The mediocrity machine has struck again.
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