NASCAR has a cheating problem

If Roy Williams were to be caught five times committing significant violations at the University of North Carolina, the NCAA would feel obligated to tell his basketball team they wouldn't be going to the NCAA tournament for a while. When track athletes and cyclists are caught doping, they're stripped of titles and banned from competition.

Punishment in sport is a tricky endeavor - part deterrent for athletes, part salve for fans. Even in sports where cheating is acknowledged as an everybody-does-it reality, punishment gives fans the appearance of integrity, the sense that their sport's field is level because the possibility exists that cheaters will suffer real consequences.

Yet NASCAR, in a puzzling cycle, continues to allow one of its best teams to violate the rules without significant penalty. It's a troubling pattern for a sport that perpetually fights to convince fans outside Charlotte and the South that it's worthy of their investment.

This week, NASCAR suspended and fined Chad Knaus, crew chief of the No. 48 team, and docked driver Jimmie Johnson 25 points for unapproved modifications made to the car's C-posts, contoured sheet metal stretching from the roof to the rear edge of the window openings, the Observer's Jim Utter reports. The No. 48, which was allowed to race in Daytona after the cheating was discovered, also will be allowed to compete in NASCAR's "playoffs" - the Chase for the Sprint Cup.

NASCAR thinks it has found the right seam with its discipline. Knaus gets fined some big bucks - $100,000 - and misses six races. The 25-point penalty nudges Johnson and the No. 48 team to the back of the pack in their chase for the title. So someone gets punished hard, but not really the driver or the team.

Most sports fans sees right through this, of course, especially given the regularity with which Knaus has been nabbed. It's almost impossible now to conclude that the 48 won five NASCAR championships without the benefit of cheating. And while the culture inside and out of NASCAR garages has forever been "it ain't cheatin' if you don't get caught," if it still ain't punished when you do get caught, what are you left with?

I've been in enough NASCAR garages in my previous life as a sportswriter in Alabama to know that some drivers and team officials ask this question, too. They know that some of the fans who joined their sport during NASCAR's surge in the 1990s carried a different expectation of how competition is supposed to work. NASCAR still struggles with this - how to reconcile its devil-may-care charm with the sophistication that audiences outside its base expect.

The simple solution that came from a couple of those garages: Slap a cheating team hard. Let a driver and his team race all season, but ban his team from the "playoff chase," and you'll slow the cheating down. It's what the NCAA has done recently with some top programs and coaches, including Ohio State's Jim Tressel. Major League Baseball, which instituted a tough drug program in the face of a steroid crisis, didn't flinch this year from trying to deliver a 50-game suspension to one of its top stars, Milwaukee's Ryan Braun.

Will those punishments stop cheating in their respective sports? Of course not. But they'll allow fans to at least believe there is integrity in the outcome - that unlike some, their sport is actually sporting.

Peter St. Onge