Bob Pockrass: Will the good Jamie McMurray show up in the next two races and make the Chase?
Jamie McMurray is 100 points out of 12th with two races left before the 12-race Chase For The Sprint Cup field is determined. // Elmer Kappell, NASCAR Illustrated
COMMENTARY
Jamie McMurray is 100 points out of a spot in the Chase For The Sprint Cup, and he needs two great finishes in the next two races to even have a chance of making the playoffs.
McMurray has had the strangest season of any driver this year. Some weeks he looks like a superstar, other days he looks mediocre.
Every race in which he leads laps and runs at the front, he looks like not just a Chase contender but a championship contender. Every race in which he struggles, racing in the middle of the pack, he looks like he doesn’t belong in the Chase.
But how can a driver who has won the Daytona 500 and Brickyard 400 miss the Chase? His Earnhardt Ganassi team would be like the college football team that upsets the No. 1 team in the country and beats its big rivals, but loses three or four conference games and ends up playing a mid-December bowl.
McMurray’s best performances have come in NASCAR’s biggest events. Not only has he won the two biggest races of the year, he finished second in the Southern 500 at Darlington in May, at Talladega in April and in the Coca-Cola 600 at Charlotte. At Bristol, considered one of the sport’s most notable venues, McMurray has finishes of third and eighth.
His only other top-10s have come at the somewhat less notable venues of Chicagoland and Watkins Glen.
With so much success, how is McMurray 100 points out of the Chase?
Easy. He has had a slew of bad finishes. While he has nine top-10 finishes, he has only four finishes between 11th-19th and four more from 20th-24th, as well as a 29th.
That leaves six other races – all finishes of 30th or worse.
Compare that with Clint Bowyer, and it’s easy to see why Bowyer is 100 points ahead of McMurray even without a win. Bowyer has three more top-10 finishes and only seven races with finishes of 20th or worse (while McMurray has 11).
If the standings were based on money earned, McMurray would be tops on the list. Thanks to his Daytona and Brickyard wins, his $5,228,268 in purse money tops everyone.
If it was based on laps led, McMurray would rank 10th – his 244 laps led is even more than current points leader Kevin Harvick (230).
But making the Chase isn’t about money won or laps led, it’s about consistent top finishes.
So can the big-game McMurray have two more big games? And is the Labor Day weekend race at Atlanta one of the series’ marquee events?
Labor Day weekend used to be a marquee NASCAR date back when the race was at Darlington. But Atlanta? It’s on the fence at best.
The Richmond race next week is a marquee event because it is the regular-season finale, when the Chase field is finally set.
Whether McMurray has two big games left in him for the next two races remains to be seen. The performances at Chicagoland and Bristol show that the Earnhardt Ganassi Racing driver can get the job done at intermediate and short tracks. The performances at Atlanta (29th) and Richmond (19th) earlier this season show that, at times, he doesn’t get the job done at those tracks.
Some feel that it won’t be right if McMurray doesn’t make the Chase since he has won two of the biggest events of the year. Others will say that if a guy finishes 34th at Vegas, 30th at Martinsville, 32nd at Dover, 36th at Pocono and 39th at Daytona in July, he doesn’t deserve to make the playoffs.
McMurray would definitely be a wild card if he makes the Chase, considering that he has shown he can rattle off strong runs this year. He’d be a new face and a great story. Many fans will be rooting for him.
But it’s hard to imagine he will be good enough – or Bowyer will be bad enough – in the next two races for McMurray to make the Chase.
McMurray likely will have to be content to be the poster child for the theory that no race is bigger than the rest, that they “all pay the same amount of points.”
If appears that McMurray will miss the Chase, and that will be a shame. The question: Is it a shame that his team couldn’t perform consistently, or a shame that the NASCAR points system doesn’t award more points for victories and top finishes?
