As Stewart steps down, what's next?

Maybe I didn't want to believe it at first -- I wrote a post on this very blog saying he wasn't ready to do it -- but the impending announcement coming Wednesday from Tony Stewart shows me one thing.

I do not have a future as a psychic.

All self-deprecating humor aside, Stewart is set to announce his retirement after the 2016 season as a NASCAR driver. Considering what's happened to him over the last three years, it may be for the best.

We all know about the broken ankle suffered in the Sprint car racing accident in Iowa that cost him the last 15 races in 2013. We all know about the accident at Canandaigua Motorsports Park in New York that killed Kevin Ward Jr. before the Watkins Glen race last August.

Those items are all old news. Stewart still has the wrongful-death lawsuit hanging over his head in a federal court in New York to boot.

But here's the bottom line -- at least a bottom-line opinion -- on why Stewart is walking away from Sprint Cup racing after what will end up being an 18-year career.

Maybe (and we as fans and media can speculate all we want) it's just not a whole lot of fun anymore.

On the positive side, Stewart has 48 wins in 582 Cup starts. He has three championships, including the memorable all-out dogfight he had with Carl Edwards in 2011.

Before that year's Chase began, a championship was the furthest thing from Stewart's mind, a point he accentuated pretty emphatically when he thought his No. 14 race team -- which was in only its third year of existence under Stewart-Haas Racing ownership -- wasn't anywhere close to good enough to do anything in the Chase.

As things turned out, Stewart was only playing major-league mind games with the rest of his challengers.

Tony started the 2011 Chase with wins at Chicago and New Hampshire on back-to-back weeks, then won three of the final four races, including the finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway, to end up in a dead-on flat-footed tie in final points with Edwards.

Stewart won the title because (insert drumroll here) he had those five wins to Edwards' one.

It was one of the best Chase battles up to that point.

Stewart had three more wins in 2012 and finished ninth in the Chase, but hasn't been anywhere close to his former glory.

Since his last win at Dover in the spring race of 2013 -- a stretch of 69 races and counting -- Stewart has a total of seven top-5s and 14 top-10s.

From 1999 through 2012, Stewart was averaging 13 top-5s and 23 top-10s per year. His career high in the latter category was 25 when he won his second Cup championship in 2005, and he had at least one win every year until 2013.

This year, which has been his first full season of racing since 2012, Stewart has exactly no top-5s and two top-10s -- sixth at the Bristol spring race and ninth at the Pocono race in August.

It's certainly not the way any driver wants to go out from what is most definitely a Hall-of-Fame worthy career.

And with everything else going on in Stewart's life, from the Ward lawsuit to ownership of a race team and race track (Eldora Speedway), no one should blame him for stepping away.

Being a racer may have driven Stewart all of these years, but being human always finds a way to catch up in the end.

Followers and comments welcome on Twitter @Tomzsports.