Invisible

 You probably missed it while the Bears were scoring eleventy-hundred points and your Indianapolis Colts were getting off to a rousing start in their season opener, but Kyle Larson drove his race car to victory in a race-car race yesterday.

(And, OK, so the Colts DIDN'T get off to a rousing start. That was a joke. So were the Horseshoes, who played like big dummies and got paved by the visiting Baltimore Ravens, 41-23.)

(Also, the Bears DIDN'T score eleventy-hundred points. They only scored 59. Caleb Williams threw for two scores and ran for two more and looked the best quarterback the Bears have had since Peter Tom Willis. OK, that was a joke, too. He actually looked the best quarterback the Bears have had since, I don't know, forever.)

Where was I again?

Oh, yeah, Kyle Larson driving his race car to victory in a race-car race. It happened at World Wide Technology Raceway in Madisonville, Ill., which is close enough to St. Louis to count as St. Louis. Larson snapped a 51-race winless streak with his win, which came in the second race of the NASCAR Cup playoffs and featured two red flags in the last 11 laps because guys kept running into one another.

I know all this only because I looked it up on a sports website. And not on the lead page of the sports website, but way back in the NASCAR section. What, you thought NASCAR was gonna be front-page news on the first Sunday of the NFL season, and also the day an American (Ben Shelton) couldn't quite close the deal in the U.S. Open final against Alexander Zverev?

(Too bad for the latter. Shelton and Frances Tiafoe are the two most dynamic American men to come down the tennis pike in a long time. One or the other's gonna win a major before long, just you see.)

Anyway ...

Anyway, seeing NASCAR turn invisible just when its playoffs get rolling makes me wonder again who's running this sport and why they can't see what seems so obvious to the rest of us. Namely, that its season is waaay too long, and consequently gets swallowed up every year by King Football and the World Series and who knows what all.

What NASCAR ought to do, in the Blob's humble opinion, is follow IndyCar's lead.

And, yeah, I know, that's the last thing NASCAR wants to hear, but listen: IndyCar does this right. It ran the last race of its season last week, on Labor Day weekend. That got it  off the stage before football and all the rest began, which is as organic a stopping point as there is.

NASCAR?

NASCAR's season begins in mid-February and lasts until the voyages of the starship Enterprise. This year it didn't even begin the climax of its season until Labor Day weekend, when it ran one of its traditionally iconic races, the Southern 500 at Darlington. It was the first race of the playoffs, which go on for another 2 1/2 months.

If yours truly were running the show, the Southern 500 would be the LAST race of the playoffs, and thus the last race of the season. I'd achieve this by axing eight to ten regular-season races and running a 26-or-27-race regular season. That seems like plenty to me.

And, again, yeah, I know. There's no way that's going to happen. Cutting  eight or ten races out of the schedule means cutting revenue stream, for both NASCAR and the venues it supports. In a sport that sucks down dollars the way Joey Chestnut sucks down hotdogs, that's a non-starter.

And yet ...

And yet, at least NASCAR wouldn't vanish into the ether once the clock struck football season. At least it wouldn't do that.