The St. Louis Cardinals won a major league leading 100 games in 2005 and didn't win the World Series. Last year's New England Patriots took an 18-0 record into the Super Bowl and came up short of a championship.
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| Engine failure ends Kyle Busch's Dover race earlier than expected. (AP) |
Busch roared through this year's NASCAR Sprint Cup Series regular season with a series-leading eight wins. But after the first two races of the Chase, his title hopes appear to be over.
Busch's engine failure at Dover doomed him to a 43rd-place finish and coupled with his 34th a week ago at the Chase opener in New Hampshire dropped him to 12th in the standings, a whopping 210 points behind leader Carl Edwards.
Suddenly the Joe Gibbs Racing driver's dream season has turned into a nightmare.
Busch didn't just win races during the 26-race pre-Chase warmup, he often did it in dominating fashion.
And while he continues to rack up victories in NASCAR's other top two series -- winning his 19th race of the season in Saturday's Nationwide Series race at Dover -- his Sprint Cup mojo has disappeared.
Some pointed out Busch was on a downward spiral as the regular season wound down when he finished seventh and 15th in the two races leading up to the Chase.
Busch laughed it off then and pointed out, correctly, that winning every week in today's NASCAR is virtually impossible.
"I guess if they want to say we had a couple of bad weeks that's fine," Busch said after his 15th-place run in Fontana in the regular-season finale. "But I know there are a heck of a lot of guys that would love to have a seventh and a 15th in the last two races."
But while Jimmie Johnson, who won the final two regular-season races, and Edwards, who also finished up strong with six top 10s in the final seven races, came into the playoffs with momentum, Busch was -– based on the bar he had set so high with his record pace –- sputtering.
But there was no way Busch and company could have expected this kind of start to the Chase, which has sapped both the chances for a title and Busch's confidence.
"At this point it doesn't matter," he answered when asked if he still had any chance at all to compete for the title. "Same thing happened two years ago -- exact same thing. Wrecked at Loudon, blew up here. So, where did we end up -- dead last."
