Fantasy Nascar Wrap

The season’s end is 2 races away and our 2 teams running in various Yahoo NASCAR leagues can already see the finish line. Team 1’s mantra was to play the traditional card. Picking drivers that had historically done well at certain races and at certain times of the year. Team 2 was to effort to play more of the hot hand. To try and pick who’s on a streak and stick with that driver until someone else got hotter. The results are in and Team 1 is ahead of Team 2 by an approx. 200 points. Which simply translates to about a race ahead. Meaning Team 1 could not start any drivers in the last race and still take the title between the 2.

In our leagues both teams have flirted with running in the middle of the pack but in the last few weeks have faded into the bottom third. In one of our more competitive leagues, Team 2 is 1000 points off the league which in some ways seems a lot. But if you view it race by race over the course of a 40 race season, isn’t much at all (25 points/race). The wildcard in this season was the introduction of the Car of Tomorrow (CoT). Some teams were quick off the block with the CoT, which played to Team 2’s advantage but as the final results show, in the end the historical teams prevailed.

The relatively poor season from Tony Stewart and the rise of Carl Edwards were definite highlights to trying to keep “track” of the racing news. Like most things in fantasy sports, if we weren’t involved in fantasy teams would we even be following these related story lines that closely? In our case, not really. Admittedly NASCAR is not our forte and in our 4 years of doing this, we’ve never won a league. Though we’ve been competitive in all years and looking back this one has turned out to be the same. Next year we’ll try to employ slightly tweaked version of our mantra’s for the 2 teams.  We’ll use what we’ve learned this past year from both how our teams performed and by what we saw from the others ahead of us. Here’s to hoping for the checkered flag next year!