NASCAR - Television Ratings Thread

The races are toooooooooo long, you can easily edit out 1.5 hours and you wouldn't miss anything. The attention span of today's youth has no time for it.
Over the last couple years, I PVR all ovals and just fast forward to the last 50 laps, but I still watch a whole road course race as there is good action throughout the field, assuming the network covers it.
 
Interesting perspectives. This year’s Bristol race, for some reason, just seemed lacking. For an eastern time zoner like myself, the night race green flagged about 7:45PM, ended around 11PM. A compelling race with constant jockeying for position in two grooves or more may keep attention for casual fans. Competition from college football hurts ratings also.
 
West said:
The races are toooooooooo long, you can easily edit out 1.5 hours and you wouldn't miss anything. The attention span of today's youth has no time for it.
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I couldn't disagree more. I think the talk about shorter attention spans is BS. If something is good, people want more of it. Young people (or any person, for that matter) either like something or they don't. Making something shorter won't attract more fans, unless a shorter race significantly improves the action on the track and the overall entertainment value.
 
2 Sweet said:
unless a shorter race significantly improves the action on the track and the overall entertainment value.
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That's exactly what it does, it makes it a sprint to the finish as opposed to just ticking off laps waiting for the sprint to the finish.
 
donthaveanickname said:
Football games take like 10 hours and they're quite popular among young folks.
What we need is good, low downforce racing to keep us entertained for several hours.
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NFL games don’t really take any longer than Cup races. Average game length trends a bit north of 3 hours. College ball trends longer.
 
West said:
The races are toooooooooo long, you can easily edit out 1.5 hours and you wouldn't miss anything. The attention span of today's youth has no time for it.
Over the last couple years, I PVR all ovals and just fast forward to the last 50 laps, but I still watch a whole road course race as there is good action throughout the field, assuming the network covers it.
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DVR’d races are great to breeze through but you could probably say that for most sports with all of the downtime in between plays/quarters/halves/innings. Sheer length isn’t really an issue but maybe how a race develops and plays out is.
 
NBC coverage is awful. As for Fox Mike Joys been great for years but he needs to retire he make to many mistakes. move Adam Alexander up to Cup.
 
DewChaser988 said:
It's time for the Playoffs to go.

All 3 races of the first round were down double digits.

And no football is NOT an excuse to explain why ratings were down 20% compared to last year for this year's Bristol race, the college football games this past weekend weren't high profile
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Something needs to be done man. Football is absolutely killing NASCAR & baseball once September rolls around. It’s to the point people simply quit caring
 
DewChaser988 said:
It's time for the Playoffs to go.

All 3 races of the first round were down double digits.

And no football is NOT an excuse to explain why ratings were down 20% compared to last year for this year's Bristol race, the college football games this past weekend weren't high profile
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I always hated this first "round", every year. Wayyyy too much going on, imo. 16 Playoff cars (ya know...only half the field), 5 or 6 "on the bubble" at Bristol...then points don't matter for 1/3rd, points do matter for 1/3rd, and the other 1/3rd are tying to collect Stage wins for points down the road....and because half the field is in the playoffs every single moment in the race causes cascading effects.

I love this sport but holy crap- it's too much for me to process, I can't imagine what a casual fan must go through. With the weekly field down to 36-37 cars I'd like to see a 3/6/9/12 elimination format if we have to have "playoffs". As it is currently I really can't follow it all til we get the field down to 8.
 
Mispeedway15 said:
Something needs to be done man. Football is absolutely killing NASCAR & baseball once September rolls around. It’s to the point people simply quit caring
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The idea that changing how you decide your champion will bring in more fans is a flawed concept to start. You need to make people racing fans or baseball fans first. If you don’t care about baseball already, do you care if they have take the best AL and NL team straight from the regular season and play the World Series right then like the good old days? Do you care if they have 8 teams? 10 and a wild card round? 12 and a wild card round?

In MLB’s case they don’t make people care any more but it does mean more games = more TV inventory + more tickets sold. NASCAR playoffs just use existing events and don’t add any commercial value. There’s no amount of championship Mickey Mouse that’ll create new fans or even make more money, especially against football. If you do not care about racing, you do not care about how a champion is crowned. Almost two decades in and there is still no evidence it helps in any way.
 
I’m afraid if you all get what you want and abolish the playoffs, then you’ll get the whining of “driver x clinched the championship with 3 races to go”. My retort to that would be “well your favorite driver and team should have tried harder to stop that”. My point here is that NASCAR is always 1A on my tv during NFL Sunday’s, it’s a nice distraction as my two teams the Dallas Cowboys and Chicago Bears have largely been inept the last 30 or so years. Plus those two teams are usually on Prime Time or a Game Of the week so I can utilize the DVR for racing if need be. Which brings me to my next point....why the angst of the big bad NFL? Why even try to compete with it? I would say nascar and racing in particular should just appeal to their niche audience during football and try to make money off of that. It worked for years during the ESPN heyday and I think could work again. The appeal to chase new fans, I get it but then you have to appeal to their needs and “attention spans”. Just dance with what brought you to the dance during football season. People watch what they want to watch and when they want to. So many get caught up in ratings. Why? I maybe over simplifying things,but on race day Sundays I just watch what I want to, usually it’s racing. We get so little of it....and by the time the racing season is over, you still have like almost 3 months of the nfl season left.
 
West said:
The races are toooooooooo long, you can easily edit out 1.5 hours and you wouldn't miss anything. The attention span of today's youth has no time for it.
Over the last couple years, I PVR all ovals and just fast forward to the last 50 laps, but I still watch a whole road course race as there is good action throughout the field, assuming the network covers it.
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Nope. I DVR when I can to fast forward commercials and catch up real time or just DVR the entire race as I’m out or watching something else. I’ll never understand the “races are too long” line of thinking. People play video games for 13 hours or binge a tv show with multiple seasons over the course of 48 hours but yet a sporting event loses interest. I’m lost on that one.
 
FLRacingFan said:
The idea that changing how you decide your champion will bring in more fans is a flawed concept to start. You need to make people racing fans or baseball fans first. If you don’t care about baseball already, do you care if they have take the best AL and NL team straight from the regular season and play the World Series right then like the good old days? Do you care if they have 8 teams? 10 and a wild card round? 12 and a wild card round?

In MLB’s case they don’t make people care any more but it does mean more games = more TV inventory + more tickets sold. NASCAR playoffs just use existing events and don’t add any commercial value. There’s no amount of championship Mickey Mouse that’ll create new fans or even make more money, especially against football. If you do not care about racing, you do not care about how a champion is crowned. Almost two decades in and there is still no evidence it helps in any way.
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I'd say more teams making it should help buoy attendance this time of year. But you hit the nail on the head, people like racing & baseball but by and large they love football. I think running premier races on USA is a terrible idea though, Darlington & Bristol deserve to be on NBC/FOX
 
Jorge De Guzman said:
I’m afraid if you all get what you want and abolish the playoffs, then you’ll get the whining of “driver x clinched the championship with 3 races to go”.
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If that ever happens, so be it. I don't think it would cause anyone to lose interest. When Irvan nearly died at Michigan in '94 allowing Earnhardt to wrap up the title early, attendance/interest didn't suffer. And all the more reason to really appreciate a season like '92. A playoff format forcing manufactured drama will never, ever, ever even come close to that organic excitement of the '92 Hooters 500. Instead of highs and lows, now we're stuck in the middle with meaningless "game 7 moments".

Nobody ever complained until '03 when Kenseth was a one win champion. They could have just awarded another five points or so to the winner each week and kept everything else the same. I'll stop there because this has been beaten to death, but I really don't think race fans would quit watching NASCAR just because someone dominates all year and clinches the championship before the season finale.
 
Eliminating a driver and a slew of team members and sponsors because of one race after they’ve invested time and countless millions of dollars throughout a season seems counterproductive.
This isn’t stick and ball. Playoffs suck. Playoffs especially suck as teams try to iron out the shortcomings of a brand new race car.
 
The first Cup playoff race on NBC was unsurprisingly the most-watched so far and two out of three series at Talladega ticked up from the last comparable race.

Cup (NBC) - 2.827M
Xfinity (USA) - 1.019M
Truck (FS1) - 653K

Xfinity and Truck earned 983K and 569K on NBCSN and FS1 last year. Cup finished Talladega on Monday two of the last three seasons but earned 3.1M on NBC in 2020.

In other events F1 at Singapore earned 1.036M on ESPN2.

SKEDBALL: Weekly Sports TV Ratings 9.26-10.2.2022 | Showbuzz Daily

showbuzzdaily.com showbuzzdaily.com
 
I find it strange how well the Xfinity ratings are and yet the Cup ratings are pretty stagnant, it’s almost like people like the Xfinity car.
 
AuzGrams said:
I find it strange how well the Xfinity ratings are and yet the Cup ratings are pretty stagnant, it’s almost like people like the Xfinity car.
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Stagnant is one way of putting it. People with the money in the series say the ratings are steady and can be counted on. ;)
 
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