Fight night!

 Hardly anyone was watching, one presumes, but the best fight of the night Saturday did not happen in the octagon or a boxing ring or even on various football fields in various college towns across America.

No, it happened in Bristol, Tenn. Where NASCAR ran the annual Bristol night race while America was watching Ole Miss beat LSU and Notre Dame tool up on Michigan State.

 What happened was Carson Hocevar and Ryan Blaney were going around and around, and then Hocevar either got under Blaney or Blaney came down on Hocevar (opinions vary). At which point Hocevar turned Ryan into the wall with the classic Bristol Tap on his left rear quarter panel.

Not long thereafter Blaney came after Hocevar in the pits, and they threw down. Well, Hocevar did, anyway. 

Seriously, check this out. That's some straight-up Mike Tyson/Joe Frazier stuff right there.

And, sure, lots of people think Hocevar is is a punk-ass b**** and Blaney's a solid citizen who was raised right, which means the good guy didn't win this time. However ...

However, Blaney's been around the barn a few times, and that includes Bristol. So he should know as well as anyone that what happened Saturday night wasn't a particularly glaring bit of villainy. It was just Bristol.

The Bristol Tap? Shoot, Dale Earnhardt pulled that stunt a million times. Ditto countless others. You squeeze 43 cars into that small a space, people are gonna run into each other, sometimes deliberately and sometimes not.

Hocevar swears it was the latter. The proper response to that is "Sure, Jan."

(Gratuitous "Brady Bunch" reference)

And Blaney?

He just caught the wrong end of it this time. In more ways than one.