I'm not a grassy knoll kind of guy, generally speaking. When the conspiracy theorists start on how the end of the Florida State-Notre Dame game was a plot by athletic director Jack Swarbrick to launch a new T-shirt line ("Touchdown Jesus Hates Laundry"), I tend to just roll my eyes and chuckle.
That even applies to NASCAR, which is occasionally indicted by Cooter 'n' them as being more contrived than the WWE. If Jeff Gordon won a particular race, why, that's nothn' but Hulk Hogan vs. the Iron Sheik, only with more horses under the hood.
I don't buy that, either, although the post-race rasslin' last week between Brad Keselowski and Matt Kenseth was just a folding-chair-across-the-back shy of Monday Night Raw. There are vaudeville elements to the sport sometimes, and there's simply no denying it.
That doesn't mean those elements are scripted, however. And neither was what happened at Talladega yesterday, tempting as it is to see it that way.
What happened was Keselowski, unmasked as a restaurant-quality punk last week, won the latest Chase elimination race to, well, avoid elimination. And got an assist from Kenseth to do it.
The conspiracy theorist version of that is, well, sure, NASCAR wanted Keselowski to stay alive because Kes is the sport's alpha bad boy right now, and NASCAR loves its bad boys. So it's better for the sport, from a drama standpoint, if it can keep Kes in the mix a little longer.
The fact that Kenseth, his sparring partner from a week ago, had a hand in making it happen only lends credence to the theory.
Well, I'm not going there. No, sir. I'm just gonna say NASCAR sure tends to have lucky stuff fall in its lap a lot, and let it go at that.
Go ahead, Cooter. Roll your eyes at me.
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