The GOAT Debate

Back in 2008 I was inspired to do the impossible. I set out to answer the unanswerable question, who is the greatest NASCAR driver of all time. At the time I was inspired by ESPN’s countdown of the “Greatest Driver In Motorsports,” and now some two years later I am re-inspired to have a go at it after thumbing through Terry Blount’s book The Blount Report: NASCAR’s most overrated and underrated. With that said, I was behind the eight ball to begin because of the fundamental flaw associated with a GOAT (greatest of all time) debate. There are many reasons why comparing different drivers, in this case, or other sports athletes is flawed and here’s a list of reasons in no particular order; schedule length, technology/money, and personal views.

Taking schedule length, for the Cup series before 1972 they ran as many as 62 races, which is about the equivalent of running one and three quarters seasons now a days. In other leagues, usually it has been an expanded schedule which causes problems, such as baseball’s home run record (performance enhancers aside), and more recently in football with undefeated seasons. Should one era of participants be penalized because of things out of their control? No, they shouldn’t, but records should then be taken with a grain of salt when analyzing them. Spoiler alert, my end all theory of picking the GOAT was drawn off of statistical analysis, which sounds more sophisticated than it was, but we’ll get into that soon enough.

Technology, well still talking general sports, training has gotten better, equipment used has gotten better and lighter, just think what Ty Cobb could do with the bats of today, or Pete Rose with the internet for all his gambling needs. In NASCAR the same is true, but the aspect I’m going to hit on is technology being more wide spread than in the early days. If you went to a race in the late 1960s and 1970s, odds were good that the winner’s name would end with Petty, Pearson, Allison, Yarborough, Baker, or Parsons. Arguments could be made for a few others, but that was it. Now, in 2010 the winner could be named Stewart, Gordon, Johnson, Hamlin, Busch, Edwards, Harvick, Burton, Bowyer, Kahne, Martin, and I could go on. Now there are teams that are dead even versus back then being across the board. With that, my third point, money is brought in because there is more money going around. Petty and Pearson dominated because they had sponsorships behind them, whereas the rest of the field had some here and there. Now, you just can’t compete without sponsorship (hint, hint, Robby Gordon). With more money influx, comes more technology, and thus closing the gap. The money/technology argument summarized is back then five or six drivers had to beat basically themselves where as now twenty or so drivers can win any race at any time.

Personal views is where most GOAT arguments lose steam, because you might just not want to debate with something that is set in their views. My first example of this is myself, who do I think is the greatest driver? Davey Allison, is he? No way, but why would I answer like that? Simple, growing up he was my favorite driver, I remember him dominating all the time, and winning. Obviously I’m not going to remember the crashes, the mid pack finishes, and all that. This was an extreme example, but I think we had a lot of that in 2001 after Dale Earnhardt died, that he was elevated to greatest driver because of the shock of what we lost. He’s up there, greatest? Well, not in my book and maybe not in my system, you’ll have to read on for that. Taking that outside the NASCAR bubble, this debate over the GOAT of other sports has this hurdle too. No Bulls fan will tell you Michael Jordan wasn’t the greatest, no Lakers fan will say that about Magic Johnson. Are they being objective? Maybe, they could probably rattle off some compelling stats, but there will always be that little bit that just pushes it up for you.

With that said, I’ll repose the question to myself. Who is the GOAT for NASCAR basing it on the statistics I know, the stories I’ve heard, and what my opinion is. No, not a shout out for Davey Allison here. My pick is David Pearson, and let me rattle off some numbers of my own such as 105 wins, 113 poles, 301 top 5s, 366 top 10s all in only 574 starts. What gets him over looked is that he only ran four full seasons. How many championships did he win during those four years? Three of them. With that track record I believe that had he raced full seasons for his entire career, he would be the “King of Stock Car Racing” or at least some sort of hierarchy of NASCAR. That didn’t happen, so we can only compare the statistics we do have which moves us into the calculation.

For the formula I am encompassing the three top NASCAR series (Sprint Cup, Nationwide Series, and Craftsman Truck). This allows modern drivers to gain up to 50 races a year, like in the old days. The formula I have created is broken down this way: if the driver won a Sprint Cup Series championship, he got 50 points per championship, a win in the series it is worth 30 points, a pole is worth 15 points, a top 5 earns 10 points, top 10 earns 5 points, for every start they get 1 point, and then the drivers’ winning percentage was multiplied by 3. For the Nationwide Series, I propose the use of the same format, except the points are 30, 15, 10, 6, 3, 1, and 2, respectively. For Craftsman Truck Series the values lower to 20, 10, 5, 3, 1, 1, and 1. Drivers were selected (because I did not want to go through every driver who has ever raced) based on three criteria. The first, was a championship in any one of the three series’. Obviously, there can be fluke wins (see Jody Ridley, Lake Speed, Greg Sacks, PP, etc), but it would be very rare to see a fluke season (Kurt Busch haters sit down, he did deserve it). If you are good enough for an entire season, you will be considered. The second criteria, was that the driver could have accumulated roughly 500 starts for the three series. This brought us Ricky Rudd, Dave Marcis, and Mark Martin to name a few. The last criteria, stipulated that the driver had to have had 15 or more victories across each series. That allowed Ryan Newman, Kyle Busch, and a few others to enter the debate.

Here’s the top 10:

1) Richard Petty – 18,489.51
2) David Pearson – 10,496.88
3) Mark Martin – 9,977.87
4) Bobby Allison – 9,977.44
5) Darrell Waltrip – 9,831.59
6) Dale Earnhardt – 9,722.65
7) Jeff Gordon – 9,360.55
8) Cale Yarborough – 8,380.44
9) Buck Baker – 7,111.22
10) Rusty Wallace – 6,877.23

So we see, I know nothing. King Richard got that name for a reason and the statistics back it up, despite what I try to do with them. Pearson being number two, can’t see anyone arguing that. Now, the dander will be raised with Mark Martin at number three. “How dare he make such a cruel formula! How does a driver with no championships get placed above those who have 1, 3, 4 and 7 titles!?” Simple, Mark has driven a lot of Cup races, Nationwide, and Truck races, oh and he’s won a good share of them. Greatest NASCAR driver, not just Cup is what I was going for, so by my parameters he’s up there. Allison and Waltrip fourth and fifth make sense, lots of starts, 84 wins a piece, and some championships. Earnhardt sixth was shocking to say the least, you’d think seven championships would have counted for something. But again, his Nationwide stats while good weren’t great, or I should say better than Martin’s. Gordon and Yarborough makes sense, each have similar number of titles and wins. Buck Baker in ninth, I guess he was better than I thought. And Rusty Wallace just squeaks in there.

When I updated this from 2008 some things came up that were interesting. Mark Martin went from 6th to 3rd now, five wins in 2009 didn’t hurt along with the extra starts. Jimmie Johnson was 33rd, adding two more titles and wins only jumped him to 21st. Twelve spots is good, but Kyle Busch went from 57th to 29th. Now could you say Johnson is better than Busch? Yeah, in cup he is, but Nationwide and Trucks, Kyle dominates. I might just do this again in a few years to see what else changes. Maybe we’ll get a new Greatest Driver? Probably not, the King has a hold on that he might never give up.