So, who deserves the Cup title?

By DAVID GREEN

Seven races down, three to go, and the inevitable tight battle for the Nextel Cup rages on. Once in a blue moon, somebody may put together a dominant end-of-season streak and lock up the title early under the new Chase format, but it didn't happen last year, and it's not going to happen this year.

The Chase format, as has been discussed ad nauseum, skews conventional thinking; any of the 10 drivers (yes, any of them) had a legitimate shot to win when the points were reshuffled and the 10th-place guy found himself within 45 points of first place. What has happened in the first seven races, and what will happen in the last three, owes almost everything to chance and very little to "earning" something in the old-fashioned sense of it.

So, who's the most deserving driver? Who truly deserves to win the 2005 Nextel Cup?

It says here that the three guys at the top of the charts right now are the most deserving candidates.

Tony Stewart has been racing during the Chase very much the way he raced at the beginning of the season. He has done everything but win. He has led laps, dominated races, finished second or in the top five with a regularity that no one else has shown.

Jimmie Johnson has been resurgent after a hot start and a lukewarm middle of the year. Much like last year, he's the winningest driver among the Chasers, and yet he finds himself in second place.

Greg Biffle has been one of the best performers on the track for the past year-and-a-half now, not just this season.

Odds are that those three will decide it amongst themselves. But, as we said earlier, the Chase format defies conventional thinking. Carl Edwards and Ryan Newman are stout talents; all it would take is a sub-par performance, not necessarily a catastrophic misstep, by the top three, and one of them could inherit the big prize.

One of the two sentimental favorites among the Geritol set still has a long-shot chance. If any driver ever deserved a championship, it's Mark Martin. It would be a great, great story if Mark rallied to win this one, but he and Roush Racing teammate Matt Kenseth may be just a little too far off the pace to make it up in three races.

Happily, Rusty Wallace already has a Cup trophy in his collection, because he's not going to win this one in his farewell season. Kurt Busch, likewise, can be counted out, along with Jeremy Mayfield.

I mean no disrespect to any of them, but none of the seven from Edwards and Newman down to Mayfield truly deserve the 2005 championship based on an evaluation of their season-long consistency.

The same could be said about last year's champ, Busch. Surely Jimmie Johnson, Dale Earnhardt Jr. and Jeff Gordon were the most deserving drivers from a February-through-November perspective, and Johnson, without a doubt, was the class performer in the last 10 races.

Old-school thinking will be served this year if Stewart, Johnson or Biffle emerge with the Cup, because they have performed best all season long, and the winner will have done the best job in the 10-race playoff. The only sour grapes with any legitimacy would be from the Stewart camp, should Smoke not win it, when they recall how that 185-point lead after 26 races melted to 5 as the points were redistributed.

Under the old format, Stewart would have been a prohibitive favorite. Certainly, he has run more than well enough to have maintained the lead he enjoyed prior to the Chase races.

But that's not the format we use now. Happily, the three best drivers all season are the three most likely to win the whole thing. May the best man win.