http://www.nascar.com/2010/news/opinion/10/13/inside-line-dcaraviel...

FROM NASCAR.COM

Eight weeks from now, the NASCAR community will gather in Las Vegas to celebrate either a fifth consecutive championship won by Jimmie Johnson, or a title claimed by whomever interrupted his reign. At the Bellagio hotel the afternoon before the formal awards ceremony, a host of other industry awards will be handed out, from championship crew chief to top engine builder to honors for humanitarianism and service to the sport. And almost certainly, Kevin Conway will be named rookie of the year, a designation that brings with it a nice oil portrait and an even nicer $100,000 check.

It's an award that will be given out almost by default, given that Conway is currently the runaway leader in a rookie points competition that this season involves only two drivers, the second of whom (Terry Cook) hasn't attempted a Sprint Cup Series event since Pocono in July. And it very well may make people uncomfortable, given that NASCAR's highest rookie honor -- the same award once given to Dale Earnhardt, Davey Allison, Geoffrey Bodine, Jeff Gordon and Tony Stewart, among others -- will go to a driver who's spent much of this season just trying to keep himself inside the top 35.

Even so, we now face the very real prospect of NASCAR "honoring" a driver whose 14th-place run in the summer Daytona race has been his only result better than 27th this season, who has finished on the lead lap just three times, who was dropped from his original team in August after a messy dispute that reportedly involved nonpayment of sponsor fees. Conway is currently 34th in drivers' points, and if he falls one more position, he would risk becoming the lowest-finishing rookie of the year since Ken Rush finished 38th in 1957, the second year the award was given. And even he won a pole and earned six top-10 finishes.

Granted, we've been spoiled by many recent rookie winners, who set the bar very high by getting to Victory Lane, often multiple times. Of the last 11 rookies of the year, dating to Tony Stewart in 1999, eight won a race in their first full season on NASCAR's highest level. The exceptions in that group are Kasey Kahne, who finished second five times as a rookie; Jamie McMurray, who won a race as a fill-in for Sterling Marlin before his rookie year began; and Regan Smith, who crossed the finish line first at Talladega but had the victory vacated by NASCAR for dropping below the yellow line. Conway, by contrast, risks becoming only the second Cup rookie winner (along with Smith, thanks to that Talladega asterisk) to receive the award without recording a top-10 finish.

To be fair, though, the rules here aren't quite as obvious as they seem. To be eligible for a rookie of the year award in any of NASCAR's premier series, a driver has to attempt to qualify for eight of the season's first 20 races. The winner is determined not over a full body of work, but by using a candidate's top 17 finishes (or 16 for Nationwide, and 14 for Camping World Trucks). It's done that way because NASCAR and sponsoring company Raybestos, which has backed the rookie awards across all three national series since 1998, want to leave some flexibility for first-year drivers who may not have the funding to run an entire season.

That criteria has produced some interesting results. David Stremme started only 17 races in 2003, but won the then-Busch Series rookie of the year award because his top 16 finishes were better than those of runner-up Coy Gibbs, who ran the full season and placed eight positions higher in final points. Johnson won three races and finished fifth in points as a Cup rookie in 2002, but he didn't win the rookie of the year award -- that went to Ryan Newman, who had two fewer victories than Johnson and placed one spot lower in points, but whose 17 best races were better.

There's also a human element to this. A panel comprised of six NASCAR executives, the reigning Cup champion, and perhaps a select group of veteran drivers can award up to 30 discretionary points based on a rookie's conduct in the garage area, on the race track, and with the media. But that panel doesn't have the power to demand a more stringent set of criteria, or withhold the award altogether -- even in a season like this one, when a clear lack of competition has rendered the honor almost meaningless. The bottom line is that Conway meets all the eligibility requirements, and Raybestos has been the longest-running continuous sponsor in the program's history, and in early December in Las Vegas, NASCAR will bestow an honor it's given out every year since 1954.

Clearly these rookie awards mean a great deal to the drivers involved, as evidenced by Brian Scott's desire to not miss a race after he split with his former team, so he could continue a tight battle with Ricky Stenhouse Jr. on the Nationwide tour. In this post-recession NASCAR, though, there aren't many quality rides out there for first-year Cup drivers, nor potential rookies ready to take them. It may be a while before we see another rookie win a race. Quick -- who's the top Cup rookie candidate for 2011? Right now, nobody knows. The door may be open for another Kevin Conway to take advantage next year, especially given that the program pays the top rookie 100 grand at the end of the season and $2,000 for each race.

You hope this down cycle is short-lived, that as the economy recovers cash will free up and good teams will start putting young drivers in cars again, as they did in the early 2000s when the likes of Matt Kenseth, Kevin Harvick and Kahne arrived on the scene and changed the face of the sport. There are some quality candidates out there, drivers such as Trevor Bayne, Justin Allgaier, Ryan Truex and Austin Dillon, up-and-comers who make you think that another competitive Cup rookie class is only a matter of time. For the sake of the rookie of the year award itself, it can't happen soon enough.