Head2Head: Can anyone be eliminated from Chase?

From a purely mathematical standpoint, all 12 drivers in the Chase for the Nextel Cup have a chance at winning the championship.

That's with a tip of the tinted visor to software engineer Ken Roberts of Raleigh, N.C., who runs a rest-of-the-season simulation every week to determine the remaining probabilities. His computer randomly generates results for each remaining race, playing out the season 10 million times.

But there's a big difference between what's mathematically probable and the reality of that actually occuring. In order to keep his simulation from skewing the figures at either end of the spectrum, Roberts forces the simulation to take into consideration 1,000 scenarios where each driver wins all the remaining races on the schedule.

So even if Denny Hamlin were to win all seven races, there's still only a 0.4 percent chance that he'll win the championship. Matt Kenseth, Jeff Burton and Kurt Busch all have less than a 2 percent chance of winning the title, according to the simulation.

NASCAR's point system penalizes bad races more harshly than it credits good ones. So no matter what you do, if you've already dug yourself a deep hole, all your competition has to do is keep pace. And the more drivers in front of you, the fewer opportunities you'll have to gain on all of them.

You might assume one driver with a 100-point advantage, perhaps even two, might run into enough trouble to fritter away the lead -- but not all three. That's why Jimmie Johnson, Jeff Gordon and Clint Bowyer have to be considered the three odds-on favorites -- and according to Roberts' computer, they account for 75 percent of the championships.

That's what makes Jimmie Johnson's 2006 season all the more unusual. In addition to posting five consecutive finishes of second or better, Johnson had to rely on misfortune for every one of the teams ahead of him in the standings.

While Johnson was rallying from 165 points out, Matt Kenseth missed the top 10 four times, Kevin Harvick was 31st at Atlanta, and the rest of the competition suffered multiple finishes outside of the top 20.

So of the drivers on the outside looking in, who has the best chance of putting together a run like Johnson did in 2006? Well, there's the problem. Of those nine drivers 100 points or more behind, only Hamlin has posted five consecutive top-10s at any point this season -- and Hamlin and Tony Stewart are the only ones with 10 or more top-fives.

All calculating aside, odds are the Nextel Cup will be inscribed with the names of Johnson, Gordon or Bowyer in 2007.

My, oh, my, how soon we all forget.

Wasn't it only a year ago that Jimmie Johnson made his so-called miraculous comeback to win the championship?

Any idea how far Johnson was down after the Kansas race, heading into Talladega with seven races to go last season?

Try 165 points. He was in eighth place.

It was the farthest out Johnson had been at any point in the Chase -- even farther out in points than he was after finishing a dismal 39th in the opening Chase race at Loudon. Yet he made up the ground and then some, ultimately capturing the championship with 56 points to spare, meaning he made up a total of 221 points over the final seven races.

Right now in the 2007 Chase, only Denny Hamlin in 12th is farther than 221 points back. It's hard to argue with any gusto that Hamlin is going to come back and win the Chase this year, because he doesn't appear to possess the combination of patience, savvy and that rare ability to make luck instead of excuses to get it done.

But technically, even Hamlin isn't mathematically eliminated -- so he can't be completely crossed off the list of contenders just yet.

Matt Kenseth, who led Johnson by 26 points after Atlanta with three races left last season, is 219 points back and in 11th. Give him cars that won't blow up and he very easily could begin a methodical march back through the field over these last seven races.

After Kenseth, there is Jeff Burton in 10th place (186 off the lead), Kurt Busch in ninth (-177), Martin Truex Jr. in eighth (-158), Carl Edwards in seventh (-142), and Kyle Busch in sixth (-136). It's too early to rule any of them out.

That brings us to the top five, which includes current leader Johnson, Jeff Gordon just six points off the pace in second, the surprising Clint Bowyer in third just 14 points back, and then Tony Stewart in fourth (-117) and Kevin Harvick in fifth (-126).

All of these drivers are within one or two good finishes -- and one or two poor ones by those in front of them -- of grabbing the Chase lead.

Keep in mind that this year the Chase expanded from 10 to 12 drivers.

But while it's fair game to admit that those at the tail end are longshots, it's premature and unfair to rule anyone completely out at this early juncture.