Daugherty And Moss Tell ESPN It's NASCAR in 2009

The fascinating on-air dynamic of NASCAR Now continued on Wednesday with big news from two very unexpected sources. One of them happens to work for ESPN.

It was host Ryan Burr who started the show by chasing down Randy Moss on the phone and getting an interesting but disjointed explanation that the football player was forming Moss Motorsports and joining NASCAR.

Moss told Burr that he "had seen some" races and heard Joe Gibbs speak about NASCAR. That was apparently enough for Moss to commit his name and his dollars to the Truck Series for the second half of 2008 and fulltime for 2009. Moss was unsure of his driver, his crew chief or the details of the operation, but the announcement was certainly interesting.

It was ESPN commentator Brad Daugherty who followed the story to comment on Moss. After addressing the issues that Moss might be confronting, Daugherty dropped a bombshell of his own. Perhaps, some viewers might have seen this coming.

Daugherty is going racing in 2009 with his own Craftsman Truck Series team and made the official announcement on NASCAR Now. It should be interesting to see how this commitment affects Daugherty's ESPN career.

ESPN's Rusty Wallace already owns a Nationwide Team and Ray Evernham is a long-time Cup owner. Boris Said owns a Roush "satellite" team and is a regular analyst on NASCAR Now. Daugherty would make another ESPN on-air announcer that owned an active team, and it is going to be interesting to see "how much is too much" for the network.

Surprisingly, one of NASCAR Now's favorite interviews is Kyle Busch. He seems to really like being on the show, and Wednesday talked with Burr in his normally enthusiastic and entertaining style. Having him on this show is always a good idea but after his Talladega performance, it was outstanding.

Burr quizzed Busch on the topics that fans wanted to know about, and Busch was a great interview once again. It certainly has been interesting to see Busch learn how to be comfortable on-camera and relate to a host hundreds of miles away.

It was a nice touch to have Rusty Wallace "tag" the piece and add his perspective that Busch was the driver on-a-roll right now and was the man to beat. Wallace tempered his comments by saying Busch was not the best driver on the planet, but the best one on the planet "right now."

Shannon Spake has not been seen on NASCAR Now very much this season, and she came along to update the Kevin Harvick commitment to random drug testing at his company. This issue has really struck a nerve with Harvick, and he continues to put out the message that things need to change.

Spake also addressed the Lepage incident at Talladega with the information that NASCAR had changed the blend line location on Sunday at the track after the big accident on Saturday. Spake also indicated that Lepage was not going to be penalized, but did not point out why. If he did blend at the right point, she did not take the time to make that clear.

Tim Brewer has been trying to lay a weekly foundation for "The Brewer Tour." This pre-produced feature has been a bit disjointed as it stops-by a NASCAR shop and addresses one small issue. The feature is too short, and Brewer is not experienced enough to choose his words efficiently. The idea is good, and it will hopefully get a bit more organized with time.

For those of you who missed the original airing of this program because of the time change from 6 to 6:30PM, the program will re-air at Midnight Wednesday.

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