Gordon may deserve title, but it's far from guaranteed

Again and again he managed to avoid outright disaster, salvaging high finishes even as everyone around him struggled. Other drivers saw his savvy and resilience, and wondered aloud how they were going to beat him. He had that combination of skill, luck, experience and perspective that was difficult to overcome. He left Lowe's Motor Speedway with a relatively comfortable double-digit points lead, and everyone in NASCAR's premier series talking about how the championship was Jeff's to lose.

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Not Gordon. This Jeff would be Burton, who a year ago at this time held a 45-point advantage over the rest of the Chase for the Nextel Cup field after a scrambling top-10 finish at Charlotte. He had been dealt adversity race after race -- a forced fuel-only pit stop at Kansas City, a flat tire at Talladega, a stall out on pit road in the Bank of America 500 that sent him a lap down -- yet managed to doggedly hang onto the lead each time. His grit and perseverance impressed everyone, especially the men he raced against. People began to talk about things like destiny.

And a week later, he was out of it. All it took was a blown engine 37 laps into the race at Martinsville Speedway for the man Dale Earnhardt Jr. had dubbed "the Iceman" to give 93 points back to the field and plummet from first in the standings to fifth. It was as if the fates had taken a sharp about-face, and all those near-calamities Burton had escaped earlier in the season were only foreshocks to the one big shakeup to come.

Now this scenario is beginning to play itself out again, with another Jeff -- Gordon, this time -- in the charmed, starring role, and plenty of onlookers sizing him up for what would be a fifth crown in NASCAR's premier series. Like Burton a year ago, Gordon has been mostly able to avoid trouble or quickly recover from it. Like Burton a year ago, he has a deceptively wide lead, this time of 68 points over Hendrick Motorsports teammate Jimmie Johnson. Like Burton a year ago, there's talk of predestination with five races still to go.

Yet the Chase, and its point gaps artificially narrowed for the sake of competition, distorts reality. When you're accustomed to margins of 10 points or less, a 68-point bulge like the one Gordon currently enjoys seems like an impassable crevasse. As we've seen time and time again in this now four-year-old playoff system, a lead like the one Gordon now holds can evaporate overnight. On paper, it looks like the Grand Canyon. But on the racetrack, it's really only 14 positions. It's more like a creek.

Granted, Gordon has the largest advantage leaving Charlotte of any leader in the short history of the Chase. Unlike Burton, he's a four-time champion who's won close point battles in the past. With two consecutive wins and 25 top-10s in 31 starts this season, he's on a march every bit as relentless as the one that earned Tony Stewart the title in 2005, when the No. 20 team pounded out 19 top-10s in a span of 21 races to take control. Gordon has been the clear man to beat all season. He fully deserves this championship, which at this point can be taken from him only by an unthinkable collapse or the unpredictable whims of the Chase. But that doesn't mean it's already guaranteed.

Far from it. In fact, this Chase would be an anomaly if it didn't feature one sizeable swing of points and momentum, something that's happened in each of the previous three editions. In 2004, Johnson was 227 points down -- a deficit greater than the 198 Stewart faces now -- and climbed to within eight of eventual champion Kurt Busch. In 2005, Carl Edwards was in sixth place leaving Charlotte, but five weeks later he had tied Greg Biffle for second. And last season brought Johnson's epic rally, one where he went from 146 down to Burton at Lowe's Motor Speedway to 56 up on everyone at the end.

It can be done. Johnson, 68 points down now, has twice made up gaps of double that size in the final five races of a Chase. Clint Bowyer, the driver no one expected to be here, is 78 down and playing with house money, with no expectations and no pressure. Stewart is 198 back and lurking like a wounded animal. All of Gordon's automotive acrobatics -- dodging the rain at Pocono, crossing the finish line at Darlington with steam gushing from under his hood, winning at Charlotte despite an engine that seized up on the penultimate restart -- could very well be signs of fate. Or they could all be precursors to the No. 24 car's own little big one, an early failure or accident that will allow the pack to reel him in.

And that, as Burton discovered, could happen as soon as Sunday at Martinsville.

The opinions expressed are solely of the writer.