Spin at work after ABC-ESPN shift
Bob Pockrass
Bob Pockrass began covering NASCAR in 1992, primarily covering short-track racing and events. He has worked for Street & Smith's Motorsports Group since 2003.
ESPN and NASCAR are asking fans to accept the fact that instead of airing 11 races on ABC – including all the Chase For The Sprint Cup events – that only three will be on network television, including just one Chase race.
They say it’s not a big deal and that the move will be good for the sport. They use statistics – on average, more people watched the races on ESPN last year than on ABC – as proof.
Makes sense. It probably isn’t too big a deal, although I’m sure those without cable would beg to differ.
But here’s the problem: NASCAR and the race tracks have been touting the fact that for the last three years 24 Cup races have been on network television.
Take this from International Speedway Corp., operated by the same France family that owns NASCAR, in its 2008 annual report:
“Over the past several years, there has been a shift of major sports programming from network to cable. The cable broadcasters can support a higher investment through subscriber fees not available to networks, which has resulted in increased rights fees for these sports properties. Cable, however, reaches far fewer households than network broadcasts. We view NASCAR’s decision to keep approximately two-thirds of its NASCAR Sprint Cup Series event schedule on network television as important to the sport’s future growth.”
Now that’s not the case. There will now be 20 points races on cable and 16 on network television.
I don’t have a copy of the 2009 ISC annual report, but I bet it will go something like this:
“ESPN recently announced that it will move the majority of its races to cable instead of network. Their 2009 ratings showed that more households watched the races on cable than on the network. While some households do not get cable, we do not believe this will make a significant impact, considering that nearly half the races remain on network television. The amount of postrace programming, which our fans want, should increase on ESPN. That is important to the sport’s growth.”
So no one should blame people for being angry and having the perception that things are better on network than on cable. It has been NASCAR people who sold us that theory in the first place.
