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Fan is short for "fanatic." No one should expect balance and reason.

Kyle Busch's latest victory, at Kansas Speedway on Saturday night, was a race. Not one of the best. Probably the worst of the season in terms of excitement. Busch didn't dominate. He was there to win when a bad break sidelined Martin Truex Jr., who led 81 percent of the laps before he left the pits with a loose wheel, one that apparently caused not by loose lugnuts but a part failure.

No worries, though. When Truex stopped dominating, Busch started.

Everyone grades on a curve. A 55-0 football game isn't as exciting as 42-39 in quadruple overtime. It's a bit better for the fans of the team with 55 than it is for the team with zero.

As an old baseball manager used to say, "Sometimes you just got to tip your cap to the opposition."

Kevin Harvick had a helmet, not a cap, as Kyle Busch drove away.

Dedicated race fans have a siege mentality these days. That's a term I first heard used to describe the Nixon White House during Watergate, and the phrase stuck with me.

Years ago, I was at Atlanta -- I think it was still an International Raceway instead of a Motor Speedway and was shaped differently -- at a media conference featuring Dale Jarrett, who had recently won the Daytona 500.

People even talked about races being boring back then, and Jarrett, in his ingrained, gentlemanly way, was trying to subtly put the media with whom he was conferring in its place. He suggested that if we wrote that the races were exciting, no one would think they were boring, and it started me ruminating in the back of the room, and I was thinking, well, it's sort of ridiculous to think that fans haven't got enough sense to form their own conclusions, and that if my writing had that kind of hypnotic effect on unsuspecting readers, I sure as heck ought to put my talent on the open market because it must be worth more than I was making.

When Jarrett started out of the room, I intercepted him and said, "Dale, just because you won, and it wasn't the greatest race in history, it doesn't take anything from the way that you drove better and had a faster car."

Then it got a bit heated, and before we knew it, other members of the media were gathering in the same way that seagulls show up when a kid starts throwing bits of loaf bread at them. I'd seen feeding frenzies before but had never been a part of one. Jarrett and I were doing our best imitation of Khrushchev and Nixon in the model kitchen back in the 1950s, or Donald Trump and almost anyone today.

Kansas wasn't much of a race, but it was one. If every race were a classic, the word "classic" wouldn't have a use.

The crowds still fall and the ratings still tumble, and folks, from those wearing suits and arriving in private jets to those wearing bib overalls and temporarily residing in an infield schoolbus painted flat black with 3's all over it, have gotten awfully defensive.

When I first started covering NASCAR, a fairly common saying was "there ain't no such thing as bad publicity," and what that meant was that if people were writing about it, it stimulated interest whether positive or not.

Now everybody wants it "just so." They're obsessed with what their focus groups, their marketing surveys and their consultants tell them. They want everything to be "on message" and use the "talking points" as a guide so that "quality branding" can be achieved.

Once again, I think they're playing the fans for fools, which the fans aren't. Some might get mad at me on occasion, but they'd be madder at the suggestion that they don't have enough sense to watch a race and see it for themselves, right through the branding and/or my hypnotic words.

Every time a driver says, "Well, from where I sat, it was a great race," and they say it so often one can't help but think if came from one of those sheets of talking points, I think, well, I have little doubt that's true, but many consider this a spectator sport.

When people ask me what gives me the right to criticize, I'm prone to make them madder when I say it's because I'm fortunate enough to live in a free country.