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The commentators always try to be neutral or favour the big names as well. That race at Gateway where Edwards dumped Brad on the run to the line for example. "I think he was trying a crossover move and misjudged it." Seriously?

The ESPN guys are consistently out of touch with reality when they are calling crashes. I loved TNT's call of the 2009 Pepsi 400 finish, Petty and Dallenbach called it how it was and it was great.

Although there are many problems with Nascar today, as you guys already addressed, TV coverage seems to be the easiest route to argue about because its point is to immediately address the fans. But the constant reminder of how long it takes for the cars to get up to speed at Talladega, the constant reminder of the yellow line rule, the ridiculous amount of coverage Danica and now Pastrana are getting for running midpack, the many hours of useless prerace, etc. shows us that the networks don't care about the fans, but only care about the dumbass channel surfers who will only watch for about 5 minutes anyway.

If you don't have good TV, you're not going to convince people to tune in again/consistently, much less get them to the track or buying merchandise.

This. I used to watch the big races on streams and the amount of ads in the races was unbelieveable its ads over ads ove ads on top of ads, and with shocking commentary.

Fortunately, ever since SportTV bought the rights to broadcast it here, it got way better. The commentators are the best the channel has and when the US is in commercials, we get an onboard or a shot of the leader, until the ads end. Even so, i spend most of the race looking at Kevin Harvick driving around or the front of someone's car, not close to anyone, which makes the races quite boring.

There have been on screen advertisemens since the mid 80's.

I fail to see how "this fact brought to you by aflac" or whatever has any effect on the broadcast at all.

Without sponsorship the races wouldn't happen at all, so I'm actually thankful for them.

The more ads shoved on the screen, the less they are talking about racing. It's just awful. I don't tune in to watch them plugging as many products they can.

Sponsorship is a good thing. Filling the screen with adverts even when you are meant to be watching racing is not. Other series survive perfectly fine without them, NASCAR can to.

Aren't the channels paying some ridiculously high price to show NASCAR as well?

Something I never thought about, but this applies to UK TV, so the Americans will have to fill me in how it works over there.

In the UK you pay your TV License (I know the US doesn't have that), and then you pay your Sky Sat subscription and then you pay for the TV Channel as an addon. And then you STILL Get bombarded with adverts. So you're already paying a shit load of cash to them anyway. Paying to watch NASCAR feels like I'm getting bent over. The coverage is worse than F1s, and at more than double the cost.

The original concept behind cable TV was that subscriber money would give the channels less need to show advertisements. However, they have now realized that they can charge huge licensing fees from the cable and satellite companies per subscriber and they can make money from showing as many commercials as possible at the same time. So now we're well and truly fucked.

Which is why other than Top Gear, some racing and maybe some stuff on the Military Channel, I don't watch much TV anymore. Thankfully I have several seasons of Top Gear on DVD. It's hard to watch a show or movie when they go into a damn commercial every 5 minutes.

Most channels don't care about entertaining any more, just making money. You just have to see the amount of cheap tacky shows that are on these days.

If they can hype it up then they can get more money out of their sponsors...

...which I think is part of NASCAR's problem. They keep hyping it up to a point it almost always falls flat on it's face and it turns people off. They hyped up the CoT, they hyped up The Chase and they hyped up Cup drivers in Busch/Nationwide.

Yeah not to mention hyping every "rivalry" like they did last season. Man the Jeff-Jimmie "conflict"

Which could have been hilarious. But it wasn't.

_________________
-Joe.
Atlanta United FC | Cincinnati Reds | Atlanta Falcons | Tennessee Titans

And in recent years commercial breaks have taken too long. You normally expect a commercial break to last two minutes but sometimes they take longer than that. When I had DirecTV I usually watched the races on HotPass because I didn't want to contend with having to take a peek at something else (a different show or a baseball game, for example) while the network broadcast was in a commercial break. The good thing with TNT's Wide-Open Coverage of the Firecracker 400 is there aren't very many commercial breaks over the course of the race, because there's always action at Daytona and I don't expect that to be any different for this year's race. Plus TNT/NBC always had a habit of breaking away from commercial whenever something happened on the track (mostly as a result of a wreck). Still makes me wish though, that TNT would go Wide-Open for the other races and FOX and ESPN would adopt something similar to what Versus and ABC utilize for their IndyCar broadcasts.

And there is my point. Some may find the amount of ads acceptable, and I respect that. But when you're already paying for the coverage it's just insulting as well.

That for me is by far the largest problem - it isn't watchable even if the sport was awesome.

It seems that there are some sponsors that pay big bucks for sponsorship in NASCAR and barely do anything with it.

While Budweiser refusing to give up their sponsorship of the Shootout is a setback, you couldn't tell me with a straight face that the amount of cash and ad time Coors spends in NASCAR comes ANYWHERE close to the amount of ad revenue they spend in the NFL. In the NFL, you will see about a dozen different Coors commercials air in a typical broadcast, yet you'll only see the same Coors "Official Beer of NASCAR" commercial play repeatedly throughout an entire race broadcast.

Some sponsors will make a big deal about being on a certain driver's car only for limited primary sponsorship. Burger King puts plenty of revenue into Tony Stewart, yet you'll only see them on the hood of the #14 for 2-3 races a year. Remember when a big team would get a one-off sponsor or a movie tie-in and have their car decked out with it's own lavish paint scheme to reflect said sponsor? Nowadays they slap a hood logo on the regular scheme and call it a day.

The fact that the teams and sponsors seem perfectly confident in keeping the same lineup every year also leaves the up-and-coming talent out in the cold. Guys like Allgaier, Bayne, Scott, and Stenhouse, might have a great future in Nationwide, but where do they go in Cup? In a figurative sense, when all the good seats are taken, will they end up in the nosebleeds? Will his road, and of others, only lead to lower budget operations? There is no reason why David Ragan, after two years of mediocrity, should still be with Roush or have UPS continue to back them. If you told me two years ago that a pay-driver and his penis pill sponsor could come into to the Cup Series with almost no experience in lower levels, screw over not one, but two teams out of their money, putter around in the rear and serve as a rolling road block at every race, and still be handed the Rookie of The Year title, I would laugh my ass off. Now that it's a cold reality, I'm not even chuckling. Frankly, I'd hate to have a guy like Justin Allgaier's lasting legacy in the Cup Series be "Well, he was a pretty good start & parker".

And there's really no need to go on about the lockout policy Sprint has on the sport. If not for Sprint's drop-the-hammer attitude on Verizon, for example, Allgaier would've not only been kept at Penske, but would probably be running in Cup this season, if not the next. The fact that NASCAR would've went as far as holding the #12 for one lap in the Daytona 500 in '09 just to please the Sprint gods shows how far the sport has fallen.

Thing is though, its not like I have to have cable or satellite TV in order to watch every single race. Sure, I would miss some of them, and all the other shows which may or may not be worth watching in the first place, but it is possible to watch the races on ABC or Fox without paying anything.

I hope the drivers mentioned above are able to hold on for a few more years and not get run off, as there should be some good seats coming open soon. I can't see guys like Jeff Burton, Jeff Gordon, Mark Martin, Bobby Labonte and Bill Elliott going for much longer in Cup. Heck, even guys like Tony Stewart, Dale Jr, Matt Kenseth and Kurt Busch have 10-12 seasons in Cup already. Whether there's enough quality drivers around to fill those seats (or replace the guys moving around to fill those seats) is a big question that I honestly don't think NASCAR (or the teams) have even really thought out well.

I know it's easy to spend other people's money, but you're not going to pluck someone with a bunch of cash and/or name-recognition from a non-stockcar discipline, give them a handful of non-consecutive starts in an ABC program and have them obtain the same level of success as Jeff Gordon, Bobby Labonte, or even Greg Biffle or Brian Vickers. I don't want to say the team owners need to suck it up and give every person who shows up a full season somewhere to prove their worth, but they need to do more in that regard in order to re-invest in the sport itself. The drivers they keep will only look good when they've got folks to run alongside them in comparison...

I started watching NASCAR in the very early 90s. Remember when there was a short track season? Now Phoenix and Loudon are considered short tracks. *shakes head.

Remember when every week was a different challenge of a track and no tracks looked the same? Now every week is a version of Kansas.

Do you remember watching a race and your driver did not have a good handling car? And how you would sit there and pray for a caution lap after lap always checking to see where the leader was, because your driver was on the verge of going a lap down? And knowing that even if he got his car handling better, he would have to battle tooth and nail to get back onto the lead lap if he did get lapped?

Remember how actually completing all 500 miles at Darlington meant something? Even in the 1996 Southern 500, only 3 cars finished on the lead lap. Now you can finish on the lead lap and finish 21st. If that is the case, what is the point of 500 miles? Why not 200? Because at the end of every race, none of the major teams have dropped out and all the major drivers are all on the lead lap nose to tail behind the safety car. So what is the point of the first 300 or 400 miles if everyone gets back onto the lead lap?

When I watch racing, I watch it for the racing, not cars being paraded behind the safety car. Watch any super speedway race before 2000, and there is tons of green flag racing. Green flag runs of 2+ pit stops all the time.

So all NASCAR has become now is entertainment. The script is have a caution with 10 laps to go to bunch the field up. Have a 4 wide finish were everyone wrecks and have everyone say what a great race it was. Repeat that script enough and that is the finish everyone expects week after week all the while ruining the races that really were special. Remember Craven vs. Busch at 2003 Darlington? How great was that? Or Earnhardt vs. Labonte at 2000 Atlanta or Harvick and Gordon at 2001 Atlanta? All those races had less then 10 cars on the lead lap. So what NASCAR needs to understand is that yes, you are going to get races that are boring and someone runs away from the field, but now and then you will get those great races that naturally come down to the final lap. NASCAR needs to let those races develop naturally and that way they will truly be special.

NASCAR started becoming entertainment in the 90's though. Not many people remember the Spring Richmond race in 1998 was the first time NASCAR did something crazy at the finish. When a caution flew with a few laps to go, instead of letting the race end under yellow, they threw a red flag! Then after the restart, Terry Labonte gave Dale Jarrett the bump and run and stole the win. DJ was pretty hot about that. So were the fans at the 1998 Brickyard 400 when another late caution did NOT result in a red flag and a green flag finish. In the early 00's NASCAR finally came up with the "Last red flag lap" to stop a race and ensure a green flag finish. But wait just a minute! Fast forward to 2004 and the Talladega race. A late caution and the race ended under caution. Won by Jeff Gordon over Dale Jr, REALLY pissing the fans off. NASCAR's response?
"NASCAR's comments on the #8 and #24 placement and why no last lap shootout at Talladega: NASCAR spokesman Jim Hunter said a videotape review clearly showed Gordon ahead when the caution lights came on. "We turned the lights on when the wreck was in progress," Hunter said. "We had a great piece of footage that showed the two cars, so it was really clear-cut that Gordon was in the lead." Hunter said Tony Eury, Earnhardt's crew chief, looked the video and agreed with NASCAR. The other part of the controversy was the fact that NASCAR did not get the green flag back out for a race to the finish, keeping it under caution to the end and igniting the fans anger when they realized Gordon was going to win. "Here and at Daytona we're not going to have a one-lap shootout just because of safety," Hunter said. "We're just not going to do that." (4-26-2004) "
Thanks NASCAR. That soon gave way to green-white-checker. Until it became apparent that yes, a one lap shootout at Daytona or Talladega WILL result in carnage. So now we get 3 attempts at it before it's official. I recall their initial stance on it was "They all sign an entry blank that says 500 miles 200 laps, and we can't cross that. Also the race sponsor signs up for the NAPA 500 not the NAPA 512."
It is most certainly a show now, and NASCAR going back on things they say just can't happen is nothing new to this sport.