Carl Edwards reacted with mock outrage Sunday when Jack Roush suggested that little short of divine intervention would allow one of his five teams to win this year’s Nextel Cup.

“What are you talking about, Jack?” Edwards said after winning the Dickies 500 at Texas Motor Speedway. He moved into third place in the Chase for the Nextel Cup standings, behind Tony Stewart and Jimmie Johnson.

Edwards was only kidding, but Roush was serious when he said he expects Stewart or Johnson or both to do well enough at Phoenix and Homestead to keep Edwards and teammates Greg Biffle, Mark Martin and Matt Kenseth – who are lined up behind Edwards in the standings – out of position to win this year’s title.

“The thing I’m doing is building toward next year and the years that will follow,” Roush said. “We’ve had a great run, even though this may not be a year of harvest.”

Roush has won championships with Kenseth in 2003 and Kurt Busch last year.

Even if he can’t make it three in a row, however, Edwards’ emergence is enough to make Roush Racing’s 2005 a very good year.

Edwards is 77 points behind Stewart, who leads Johnson by 38, with two races remaining. Unless Stewart and Johnson falter at least once in the final two weeks, a championship in his first full season will likely exceed Edwards’ grasp.

Edwards, 26, isn’t officially a rookie because he ran too many races at the end of last year to qualify for that title. That technicality doesn’t change the fact that he is still learning his way around this series.

If he improves as much in the next 12 months as he has in the past 12, he will be hard to handle in next year’s title race – and for years to come.

And Edwards’ crew chief, Bob Osborne, also is in his first full year as a Cup crew chief. He was an engineer with Mark Martin’s team before Roush asked him to take on the new role, and he, too, is learning fast.

“I don’t know if I have or not,” Osborne said when asked if he has grown into the job. “When Jack asked me to take on this job, he asked me what I would need help with the most. Anything – he’ll get it for me.

“And I told him, ‘The only thing I really will need help with, in my mind, is calling the race.’ And he said, ‘Well, you’re on your own there. You’re going to have to learn it.’ That has gotten a little bit better, but I still am really uncomfortable calling races. It’s high-pressure, live-or-die type of job, and you either can do it or you can’t do it.”

Osborne was faced with such a call Sunday on a late yellow. He elected to have Edwards pit for two new tires, a decision that left the No. 99 Ford sixth for a restart with 11 laps remaining.

“Before we pitted, I definitely thought that was the way to go,” he said.

“After we pitted, I definitely was second-guessing the decision. I really thought the 6 car (Mark Martin) would pit, and I thought that would push everybody else’s hand to pit also, and he didn’t and that worried me a little bit.”

Edwards hasn’t done everything right this year. At times, for instance, he’s frustrated some competitors with what they felt was overly aggressive driving. That’s been part of his learning process, he said.

“I used to have this delusion that if I didn’t win every race that that was failure,” Edwards said. “That is the wrong way to approach racing. I have to come to realize as long as I do my job the best I can do it and I don’t make mistakes, then that is a great day. That’s all you can do.”

The smarter Edwards gets, the more trouble he’s going to be for the rest of the drivers he’ll be racing for the rest of his career.