Come on, did most of Friday night’s games really need to be postponed? By meteorological terms, Friday night saw intermittent rain showers pass through the area. In Laymen’s terms, it drizzled off and on for a little.

But there was no lightening. There was no thunder. There were no torrential winds or grapefruit-sized chunks of hail. There was nothing but a few drops of moisture.

So why the postponements? It’s football, remember. It’s played outdoors, in the elements. Remember the Ice Bowl? That was when Green Bay won the first Super Bowl in frigid conditions, not when Ted Williams’ family fought over his remains. Football is supposed to be sloppy. It’s supposed to be messy. It’s supposed to look like my futile attempt at cooking authentic lasagna.

I know that area schools want to preserve their fields, but sometimes it gets ridiculous. When I was informed Friday that my game was postponed, I was extremely confused. I looked out of my window and heard birds chirping and saw the sun shining. I immediately surmised that it was my buddy Saunders playing a joke on me—which he does often—so I hung up the phone.

Thank goodness the people here at the Potomac News are so understanding.

Scared you, didn’t I? Yeah, that Car of Tomorrow is pretty scary looking, anyway. And the reviews on how it drives have been mixed; perhaps that’s just drivers being miffed at stepping out of their comfort zone.
If it’s supposed to improve driver safety, then I’m all for it. And everyone seems to believe that it will.
But what will it do to the racing? Clearly, that shouldn’t be the number-one factor — safety should be — but it certainly should be in the low single digits.
No one knows. And that’s what is most troublesome.
Let’s leave the safety issue out of this for a moment, because I think we’ll all agree that is the paramount issue.
It’s troublesome because NASCAR, week in and week out, has a pretty good product. There are some races that just stink (Bristol in late August), but there are generally more good races than bad.
Now, suddenly, the sanctioning body wants to radically change the most fundamental aspect to the sport: the cars. There have been tests and tests and more tests.
But we won’t know how it races until there are 43 cars on the track, something no test can replicate. We won’t know until there are 43 cars on the track at a short track, a mid-length and a superspeedway.
NASCAR’s product is pretty good. Why, again putting safety aside for just a moment, would it want to risk that?
If you’ll recall, this change has not been welcomed by team owners, who have to shell out millions of dollars to replace a fleet of racecars that will be obsolete in a few months.
Owners did everything they could to get NASCAR to reconsider. It didn’t.
In some ways, it seems like NASCAR just wanted to reassert its authority: This is what we’re going to do and if you want to race with us, you’ll follow along nicely.
If we bring safety back into it, are the cars now being used unsafe? Thankfully, there haven’t been many major injuries recently (cross your fingers) despite some scary looking crashes — Mark Martin at Lowe’s, Jeff Gordon at Pocono.
Obviously, we can’t have enough safety in what is, no matter how you slice it, a very dangerous sport.
But are the additional safety benefits worth the risk of the ruining the good thing NASCAR has going? If there is a great increase in safety, it’s a no-brainer. If it’s only a marginal increase in safety, is it still worth it?
That’s a tough question. Quality of racing, on some level, must be considered, but at what cost?
I’m not sure I have a good answer for that, and that’s what’s most frustrating. The folks in charge at NASCAR can make a pretty good guess at how much safety will improve, but one can never really know. Much the same, we can make less-educated guesses about the quality of racing, but won’t know for sure until the COT makes its debut.
The COT could be the next big thing, or it could be the New Coke.
If the experiment fails, do you think owners will enjoy being told to scrap their fleet a second time?

Not that big of a deal, right? Thirteenth isn’t completely unacceptable for a Chase driver. Then I started reading around and seeing all of the intrigue…
But Burton finished a lap down and was denied a chance to gain even more spots by a dubious caution. Seems there was some debris on the track just as Burton was about to get a lap back.
It was not a fortuitous caution for Burton, but definitely so for someone else — Robby Gordon, who stayed on the lead lap and managed a 10th-place finish.
There seems to be no question that the debris came from Gordon’s car. But depending on who you ask, of course, you’ll get varying answers on whether it was an accident or something more dubious.
Burton: “NASCAR should stop every car on pit road and check for roll bar pads and whoever threw theirs out should be fined 185 points and $100,000 because it was a huge impact on the race. ... It is starting to happen just too often and NASCAR gets on everybody when it happens. Well, they should find out who did it and penalize them.”
Gordon in a post-race interview on NBC: “I definitely didn’t throw anything out the window, so I don’t know. It looked like it came out the back of the car actually.”
Race-winner Tony Stewart: “That’s pretty common in NASCAR, somebody just needed a yellow. It would be nice to find out who the perpetrator was.”
At least there’s something unusual to capture attention, even if the Chase hasn’t been very exciting.

Of course, every weekend some drivers are going to head home early. And frankly, at least three of those drivers were among the most likely to get left out. They’re racing for underfunded teams who realistically have no shot against the big boys like Hendrick and Roush.

Still, they at least deserve a shot. But what can you do? Mother Nature rules the day, and it’s tough to overrule her.

The most disappointing omission is Allmendinger, who would have made his Cup debut. He signed with Toyota’s Red Bull Racing earlier in the week and had run a few Truck events for Bill Davis Racing earlier this year.

Allmendinger is an accomplished open-wheel driver, becoming an up-and-coming star in the Champ Car series.

It’ll be interesting to see how Allmendinger fares. Clearly he’s not received the publicity that NASCAR’s other major defection - Juan Pablo Montoya - has, but Allmendinger’s got a load of talent, too. Will the learning curve be the same for both, even though Allmendinger is six years younger (and, so it seems, six years less set in his ways)?

We’ll have to wait for another day to find out. And there’s always next year, too.

-- FOLLOWING UP ON an item earlier in the week, rookie David Ragan has bought time with Tony Stewart - literally - to talk about their run-in last week at Martinsville. Ragan got into a wreck with Stewart and Ken Schrader, who were both critical of him in post-race interviews.

Ragan bid $5,750 in a charity auction to get a ride around Atlanta with Stewart. He said the two have never met in person.

It’s nice to see him take advantage of the situation - even if it is in such an unusual manner - to become a better driver. I still believe NASCAR made the right call by not approving him for the Atlanta Cup race, but I feel better seeing him charge and try to learn from a bad situation.

How much fun would it be to be the third wheel in that car, too? If we know anything about Stewart, it’s that he has no problem holding back.
But I bet the average Joe who bet $5,725 is pretty ticked off right about now.

-- AS ALWAYS, drop an or fill out the comment section if you want to sound off. As we come to the end of the season, I’m looking for suggestions on how to make this little deal more interesting and generally better for you guys. If it’s a technical issue that I don’t know how to solve (and that’s entirely possible, believe me), I’ll huddle with our web boss and see if she has any suggestions.

Enjoy the race on Sunday…