CHARLOTTE, N.C. -- Ryan Blaney doesn't feel like he has a bullseye on his back as the reigning Cup Series champion. That doesn't mean his competitors aren't trying to take the title from him.
"Everybody is envious of where you're at," Blaney said at Playoff Media Day. "Everyone wants to take it away from you, and they want all the outside to stop talking about you being the champ. They want to be that (champion).
"I was the same way before we won the championship."
Blaney's title defense season has been the opposite of his championship campaign through 26 races. He posted 11 top-10 finishes in the 2024 regular season and won two races. He enters the playoffs as the fifth seed with 2,018 points.
Last season, Blaney won one race during the regular season -- the Coca-Cola 600. He finished top 10 in 12 of the 26 regular-season races. He finished 30th or worse four times in six summer races.
Blaney started the playoffs as the 12th seed, and he dealt with some early struggles. He finished 22nd in the Bristol Round of 16 elimination race and then he wrecked the following week at Texas to open the Round of 12.
How did Blaney recover? He won the following week at Talladega to reach the Round 8. Four weeks later, he won at Martinsville to reach the Championship 4. A runner-up finish at Phoenix in the season finale secured his first Cup title.
"We just didn't let (the slow start) bother us," Blaney said. "We just had the end goal in mind.
"And I even think the end goal in mind is, like, different this year than last year, just how you approach it because we hadn't won a championship last year, and we still believed 100% in ourselves that we could do it. And now you have that championship on top of it, you're like, 'Oh, man, we 1,000% believe that we can do this again.'"
Blaney ended the last two races of the 2024 regular season early due to crashes. It wasn't ideal, but it did little to diminish his confidence in himself, crew chief Jonathan Hassler, and the entire No. 12 team.
He knows that this group can band together and battle through adversity to win a title. They did so less than 12 months ago.
At this point, recovering from issues at Daytona and Darlington isn't the priority. Putting the entire playoff field on notice is more important as teams head to Atlanta to kick off the Round of 16.
"That's what I've told my guys, like, 'I want to scare every other team,'" Blaney said. "'I want you guys to be so good that everyone is nervous about us when we unload.'
"And that's kind of the mindset that we've tried to have because I think that it's a great mindset for everyone on the team to have. You want everybody worrying about you because you can be that dangerous."