More than a kneeling: Nascar's TV ratings decline is as worrying as the NFL's. Why?


The fans of America’s two most popular sports skew older and lean conservative. So if protests are to blame for the NFL’s ratings erosion, what’s Nascar’s excuse?

The Nascar season comes is down to one race on Sunday at Homestead Miami Speedway with Kyle Busch, Kevin Harvick, Brad Keselowski and Martin Truex Jr still in play for the championship. Photograph: Jonathan Ferrey/Getty Images


The latest figures show NFL’s TV ratings are down 5.7% from last season. While in the grand scheme that’s hardly catastrophic for a product that outdraws everything on television by significant margins, the league’s owners are nonetheless sounding the alarm.





In the main Nascar patrons skew older and lean conservative. They’re not unlike their NFL counterparts in that way. Really, both fanbases seem to be after the same spectacle, something that pays heed to the Good Lord Above while a bunch of overgrown boys in costume run around narrowly cheating death. They’re waiting for the pileup.

Tennessee v Virginia Tech at Bristol Motor Speedway
Last year the University of Tennessee played a college football game against Virginia Tech at Bristol Motor Speedway that attracted a record 157,000 spectators. Photograph: Michael Shroyer/Getty Images

Off course, there are off the wall suggestions. Last year the University of Tennessee played a college football game against Virginia Tech at Bristol Motor Speedway that attracted a record 157,000 spectators. Why not make it a wild and crazy weekly event? Imagine lightly used sideline players changing tires during pit stops, offensive assistants spotting for drivers while the other team has the ball. Imagine Joe Gibbs, the Hall of Fame coach turned Nascar team owner, relaying football plays on one radio channel and racing strategy on another. Imagine a quarterback trying to snap the ball over the rumble of 40-odd corn-fed V8s. Full-Throttle Football, they could call it.

Or they could simply accept that traditional television has been in decline for a decade and adjust accordingly, by leaving its audiences wanting more instead of overwhelming their base urges. For the NFL that means ending the Thursday football experiment and making the RedZone Channel, its best and most youth-friendly delivery mechanism, more widely accessible. For Nascar that means cutting tens of hours of race broadcasts down to the best three hours. It means starving people, and then feed them. It means throw the fat online, and see how much they’ll pay for it. In fact, Nascar could just dump it all on Netflix – which, according to one study, is responsible for half the decline of TV viewership alone.

More to the point: both sports need to be patient with their young stars. They need to push them, too. The NFC-leading Philadelphia Eagles, helmed by an ascendant second-year quarterback named Carson Wentz, should’ve been flexed into at least one of the three primetime games that were awarded to the hopeless Miami Dolphins. (Memo to the league: America’s just not that into Jay Cutler.) Bubba Wallace, a black driver who will race full season in the Monster Energy Cup series a team fronted by the legendary Richard Petty, could well turn out to be Nascar’s Tiger Woods. Remember the NBA after Michael Jordan retired? Baseball after the steroid scandal? Hockey after NHL lockout. They seem to be doing just fine now, relatively speaking.

Patience is a virtue. So is a keen multi-platform strategy. The viewers are out there. They’re just not congregating by the traditional outlets. They’re just not quite registering as clearly when they’re gathering around someone else’s cell phone for the race. Or when they’re gawking at the game playing on the big screen in the department store, protest be damned. Yes, the NFL and Nascar are in a real bind. But it’s nothing they can’t get out of with a rarer, higher quality product and a healthy dose of forbearance. Americans always want more of what they can’t have, especially if they believe they should be able to get it without leaving their couch. And if that doesn’t work? Well, they could always join forces.

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