Not just out of the loop, as it was, but off the planet.
Having recently moved, I have been waiting on the cable guy to come hook up my service.
Y'all know the drill, we will come sometime between noon and midnight sometime in July -- in the year 2014. So for the last two weeks, I have been without cable, the Internet, my DVR and all the other things that make life worth living.
No races, racing Web sites, or insane racing rumors.
No baseball.
No hockey.
No World Cup.
Yeah, those last two will bother you when you don't even have the option of watching them.
I have burned holes in my DVD collection. It's really pretty sad: I can recite lines from the first two seasons of The A-Team now. I have read somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 books and have created the world's greatest Madden football team.
So imagine my surprise when I finally regained my portal to the real world, which seems like an odd statement from a newspaper guy, and caught up on all the changes in the NASCAR world over the last couple of weeks.
No more Nextel Cup in 2007. It's going to be the Sprint Cup or the Sprint/Nextel Cup or the Sprint/Nextel/Motorola/Nokia/Samsung Cup brought to you by your friends at AT&T or some such nonsense.
Sprint also fired a bunch of the people, whose names you or I would have never known, who were responsible for bringing Nextel and NASCAR together.
When I got online for the first time this week, I figured the first thing I should do would be to check the race results that I missed. Honestly, I had no clue.
Jeff Gordon won on the road course. Wow, no shock there.
Kasey Kahne won his fourth race of the year. Lil' bit of a shock there, considering he had all of one win coming into the year.
Then came the big one.
I like to consider myself pretty knowledgeable about racing. I keep up to date, cable and Internet blackouts notwithstanding, and like to think I know what's going on.
But I swear I had never heard of David Gilliland, so when I saw that he had won the Busch race at Kentucky a couple of weeks ago, I was stunned. Turns out, he had all of five starts this year for Clay Andrews Racing. Coming into this year, he had completed a grand total of 35 laps in the Busch Series. He is currently 50th in the 2006 Busch Series points standings.
And he won a race. These days in NASCAR, that kind of stuff just doesn't happen.
I'm excited.
As I dug deeper into the past news I saw a few other interesting stories involving who's going where in 2007. Brian Vickers to Red Bull Racing makes no sense to me. Why would this guy leave an established organization like Hendrick Motorsports, for whom he's won a championship, for a new team?
I guess we could ask the same question of Dale Jarrett.
Maybe it's the whole big fish, small pond thing.
I have to think that Toyota was getting a bit desperate and had to make a run at Vickers after targeting Kevin Harvick and Elliott Sadler and missing.
Casey Mears is also going to be in a new place in 2007 -- probably taking Vickers' seat with Hendrick. That should go over well, considering the year-long feud between Mears and would-be teammate Kyle Busch.
Mears was given his release from his contract with Chip Ganassi Racing, even though he has been saying all year that he really, really, really wanted to drive Chip's Dodge for years to come.
Seems a bit duplicitous to me, but what do I know, I've been out of it lately.
Andy Cagle can be reached at acaglenc@earthlink.net.
