ESPN2's problems with covering NASCAR action on Saturday afternoons have been well documented this fall. Once the college football season began, NASCAR took it right on the chin from the network.
The core problem has been the college football game that begins each Saturday at Noon Eastern Time. College football games take three and one half hours, but ESPN has continually scheduled live NASCAR at 3PM. Needless to say, problems followed.
Once again this Saturday, ESPN2 has UConn playing Syracuse at Noon, followed by the final NEXTEL Cup Happy Hour at 3PM. Since Happy Hour is followed by the NASCAR Countdown pre-race show and then the final Busch Series race, the on-air time of Happy Hour will be "collapsed" as the football game runs past 3PM.
This means if the football game runs at normal length, ESPN2 viewers will miss half of the final Happy Hour. If there is an on-field serious injury or overtime, NASCAR may lose live TV altogether for the final NEXTEL Cup Happy Hour of 2007.
ESPN2 will once again feature Dr. Jerry Punch, Rusty Wallace, and Andy Petree on all three Saturday programs. Allen Bestwick will host NASCAR Countdown from the Infield Studio alongside of Brad Daugherty. The pit reporters will be Mike Massaro, Jamie Little, Dave Burns, and Shannon Spake.
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214 comments:
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Those presentations were a bit rough tonight. Going to be interesting tomorrow.
Lots of credit to Jerry Punch for keeping focused and pumped-up despite his "sailing" issue returning. Rusty and Andy were fine, just not fine together.
Great pictures, good graphics, and no crazy music videos. Few TV gizmos and no one on-camera during green flag racing.
I wonder if the ESPN boys read the posts on the feature story from Friday night? They certainly did a lot of things that NASCAR fans asked them to do.
What a nice way to end the year that would be, a little pop for The Daly Planet!
Thanks again for all your comments on the Busch Series events this season. It has absolutely been a blast.
For the most part all year ESPN's Busch Series races have been pretty good quality. Allen Bestwick is certainly a better studio host than the football announcers are, but unfortunately Allen is only used on the Busch broadcasts.
No glaring issues with today's broadcast like missed restarts. The only big complaint I have besides Draft Tracks is their meltdown when that last caution flag fell in the middle of green flag pit stops. As soon as the yellow fell, the ESPN scoring crawl vanished and the announcers never followed up on who got trapped a lap down and who didn't, and who the Lucky Dog was during that yellow. This was a critical moment in the race and the viewers were left clueless as to how exactly the field shook out as a result of that untimely yellow. We could kind of make sense of things after the crawl returned after the restart, but we had to wait far too long with zero running order information during that extended caution flag.
I hope tomorrow's broadcast is at least as good as today's broadcast, but based on today's Happy Hour debacle where only 8 out of 43 cars appeared on camera during the session and almost all of the time was devoted to Johnson and Gordon, I'm not holding my breath.
I am really interested how the Cup Post race will be handled. ABC has a live award show immediately following the race. Both Speed and ESPN 2 over ran their programming block for the awards ceremonies. They had the ability to do that based on what was next on the tv schedule. Tomorrow does not allow for such an overrun for ABC.
You would think that if the average age of the top 4 winners is 38 years old, they would have jumped at the chance of interviewing a 20 year old who came in 5th.
@stricklinfan--they always do that if the champion clinches early. They do the "unofficial" one where ever they clinch it but it's not "official" until Homestead. So if they clinch early they have 2 "ceremonies"
Like others have noted, the championship presentations were a joke...
haus20 said...
Like others have noted, the championship presentations were a joke...
November 17, 2007 9:11 PM
why would you say that? this was the official ceremony. even if Carl clinched earlier.
Did you see the presentation? The owners championship was in victory lane, there was no organization to it and the driver presentation didn't even include Mike Helton. There was no coordination. There should have been two presentations made on the stage at the start finish line.
Some may say, well that wasn't possible because RCR won the race...I would think that NASCAR would have a better plan for that scenario than what was displayed today.
Overall I enjoyed the coverage today.
The Countdown show was excellent, with AB clearly showing why the fans enjoy his commentary.
I keep watching some old ESPN races, trying to compare them to this season. Jerry Punch did such a great job on pit road. His voice is meant more for short 1-2 minute segments that inform the viewer of what's happening on the track. He would even be good at hosting the Countdown show.
I just pray that Allen gets back in the booth next season. I don't understand why he isn't already there. I like Jerry, but Allen is simply the best, and it's a waste for ESPN to have such great talent in a minimal role.
JD, when NASCAR Happy Hour re-airs, will it be the full hour or the shortened version we saw earlier.
I just want to know what happened to McDowell in the 00? According to the ticker, he was running 12th with 24 laps to go. Then suddenly he was in 32nd and listed as "OFF". Never heard the reason why on ESPN2.
And why did they interview Matt Kenseth? Sure, he made it into the top 10, but why not use that time to interview David Reutimann or Jason Leffler?
Decent coverage. This is the first race in a while that I have almost fully paid attention to on tv. They need to put a gag order on Rusty talking about Steven. Sorry, don't know who said it, but after the 2nd or 3rd caution, they came back and mentioned that the 10 had damage. It took 2 more cautions to find out what it was because they spent most of that time talking about Steven. It was only a matter of time until he wrecked.
It would have been nice if they updated who pitted and who didn't and what the running order was after the pit stops. This would have been especially helpful after the Ragan incident to find out who was still on the lead lap and who was caught a lap down. Thank goodness for fox sports/msn. I was able to find out where my driver was.
More attention should be paid to the Busch-only regulars. Jason Leffler finished 3rd in the points, from a Busch team that has no Cup backing, and was battling Harvick for that position. 4 of the top 10 in points are Busch-only regulars. Sure most of the Cup guys didn't run the full schedule, but those 4 teams ran without the major cup $$. (stepping off soapbox now.)
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