NASCAR is in the midst of its year-end playoff, and the PGATour has just completed a very similar set of endgame tournaments to award the FedEx Cup to – shock – Tiger Woods.

The set-ups are similar: prior to the end of the season dash for more cash than most of  us could hope for in a lifetime, a coterie of elites at the top are separated from the ineligible others to create a pseudo playoff.

In NASCAR, the Chase for the Cup is the last 10 races on the regular schedule. Only the top 12 cars are actually eligible to win the Cup. The others are basically racing for next year. In golf, there were four tournaments with fewer and fewer golfers eligible each week, based on their 72-hole total the previous tournament.

I don’t like either format and here’s why.

The PGATour champion should be the player with the lowest average or total score for the most tournaments during the season. This would give the average Tour palooka a bit of a chance at some glory, even without invitations to the majors, because they were willing to slog it out in the backwater events. The big names shun tournaments in Mississippi, Tennessee and Iowa and the like, largely, I think, because they don’t want to sweat through their expensive golf slacks on national TV.

It should be based on, say, your best 20 tournaments. If you don’t play in 20, then you aren’t eligible. This would help the smaller tournaments, whose charity arms are arguably more important to their communities than the bigger events' charities, gain a better field because the studs couldn’t opt out as easily.

Artificially ending the season early and calling the leftovers “The Fall Finish” is a smack in the face to golf fans. It’s the PGATour Lite. Once football season is on, golf should be off. Period. And the champion ought to be selected based on season-long play, not a handful of tournaments at the end. We are denied the opportunity to see someone come out of nowhere and pull off an upset, one of the best things about watching sports.

With NASCAR, the situation is similar. At a certain point in the season, only the top 12 drivers are eligible to win it all in the Chase for the Cup, but the full race pack of the other 31 slogs on, maybe trying to win a race, get a sponsor, or get in the way of a Chaser you don’t particularly like. A loss for your rival is a NASCAR Pyrrhic victory.

Although the racing is still good, one can never forget that it is a two-tier race you are watching. Even if the top drivers falter, the No. 13 driver has no chance (i.e., zero, zip, nada, none) for the upset, even if he wins a number of races. NASCAR has effectively limited whom you can root for – or against.

Why not let them all race for the cup, but make the last 10 races count for more? For each race, the points earned for each position (maybe just the top 10?) could be boosted race by race, so that winning a few late in the season might be enough to pull a lower down driver way up in the standings, maybe even to No. 1. For my tastes that would be preferable to what we have now.

Let the golfers golf and the drivers race. Don’t try to artificially pump up excitement in ways that interfere with “the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.”