Hope You Are Having A Nice Holiday

Happy Thanksgiving to all and we hope the day goes smoothly where family and friends are concerned.

Below is the Thanksgiving menu at TDP for you to browse once the eating and football is done. Just click on the title to open the story and as always your comments are welcome.

Who was the best pre-race show host of 2008?

Your choice for best pit reporter this season?

Who was best in the booth when it comes to race analysis?

How about your favorite play-by-play announcer of the past ten months?

New: IRL chooses to use Brazilian ethanol in 2009 with an explanation.

How you are ultimately paying for these big ESPN sports TV contracts.

The TV cost-cutting talk has begun for the 2009 season with Fox and ESPN leading the way.

ESPN and GEM's Ray Evernham is making news for rumors of retirement.

TDP will return on Friday with the continuing "best of 2008" series and we greatly appreciate all the wonderful comments on these topics.

IRL Ethanol Story Not Making Americans Happy

Normally, we do not talk about the IRL but this story is a true lesson in media relations. As you may know, the IRL cars run on ethanol. Just like NASCAR uses only Sunoco racing fuel, the IRL also picks an ethanol supplier.

As the various US-based racing series move into 2009, everyone knows it is going to be very important to carefully think through every decision in terms of suppliers and manufacturers. Apparently, this left the IRL in a tough spot where an official fuel supplier was concerned.

Click here for the USA Today story about the IRL choosing to use only Brazilian ethanol in 2009 in exchange for promoting that product and other Brazilian-made products in the IRL telecasts.

As racing fans may remember, the IRL was effectively split in half by the power of ESPN this past season. After a long run on ESPN and ABC, the big media company told the newly-united IRL it was only interested in the Indy 500 and a handful of other races. Eventually, the IRL partnered with Comcast-owned Versus for its TV future.

The Brazilian ethanol decision has resulted in some hard feelings from US-based ethanol manufacturers. Click here for the letter sent to Tony George by the head of the Renewable Fuels Organization that outlines those concerns.

After a tough season of few cars and little drama, the IRL seemed poised to enter 2009 with a new energy and many more teams. Instead, it now limps into the new year with a TV contract on a still-struggling cable network, American ethanol manufacturers fuming and several top names in the sport defecting to the Grand-Am Sports Car Series to race Daytona Prototypes.

It was September 11th of last season when one of the biggest on-air miscues in recent memory showed TV viewers just how off-kilter the IRL television package had become. Click here for the TDP column about that incident with Marty Reid at Chicagoland Speedway.

The furor over the ethanol decision is going to grow because of the combined forces of the bad American economy and the holiday season. This is exactly what the IRL did not want to see as it tries to keep itself afloat in these difficult times.

This issue became so big that IRL executive Terry Angstadt issued a statement on Thanksgiving day. You can read it by clicking here. What Angstadt effectively said was that the IRL was unable to reach a deal with an American-based ethanol supplier. He further explained that the American supplier the IRL used in the past was going out of business.

It should be interesting to watch how the media and the Internet deals with the issue of the IRL racing on Brazilian fuel even if no American supplier wanted to participate.

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Why Ultimately You Are Paying For ESPN's Big TV Contracts

It was hard last year to try and really explain the overall strategic impact of the shift in NASCAR TV programming. ESPN acquired the ten Chase for the Championship races, the seven Sprint Cup races before the Chase and the entire Nationwide Series.

This effectively put ESPN in a tremendous position of power as far as the overall perception and impact of NASCAR in North America was concerned. While Fox makes a big deal out of the Daytona 500, that network is long gone before the real drama begins. TNT comes and goes very quickly, making the summer Daytona race the focus of their efforts.

It is ESPN that has surrounded NASCAR. They have the end of the regular season, all of the playoffs and the second-tier series. In addition, ESPN originates the only daily NASCAR news program and floods the Internet with NASCAR content through the ESPN.com website.

As most sports fans know, ESPN has made news by paying incredible amounts of money for the rights to SEC college events and most recently for BCS college football games. That leads to the question of where this large amount of money is coming from? The answer is easy to understand. It came from you.

Click here for the outstanding summary by Clay Travis over at Deadspin.com of the recent headline article in the New York Times. Clay summarizes for sports fans exactly how the ESPN financial engine works and what role cable TV customers play in that equation.

This is the original story from veteran sportswriter Richard Sandomir of the New York Times. Sandomir is factual and polite as he describes the sequence of events that ultimately led to ESPN winning the Bowl Championship Series TV contract.

It may come as a surprise that ESPN charges cable operators almost four dollars a month per viewer for channel access. The resulting four billion dollar annual windfall makes it pretty simple to outbid over-the-air broadcast TV networks that derive no additional income from cable TV carriage.

As NASCAR fans know, when the college football season starts, NASCAR moves to the back burner across the ESPN family of networks. The power of ESPN over NASCAR has been demonstrated since the contract first began in 2007.

Suddenly, practice sessions were not televised. The Nationwide Series races tried to survive between live college football games and the NASCAR coverage on ESPNEWS and SportsCenter effectively ended in September.

The balance of power was ultimately demonstrated in "the big switch" of the East and Central Time Zone audience from ABC to the ESPN2 cable TV network while the Phoenix Cup race was in-progress. Just a reminder, that was the next-to-last race of the season.

Both the Deadspin and NYT articles are much more effective than I could ever be in explaining the financial pathway that has enabled ESPN to become a media monopoly. It seems ironic that after paying billions of dollars for college sports contracts, ESPN is seeking to significantly downsize the NASCAR TV production costs for 2009.

Thanks for taking the time to read the linked articles and thanks to both Clay Travis and Richard Sandomir. The comments section is open for your views on this topic. Just click the COMMENTS button below and follow the easy instructions. Your comments will appear shortly after they are submitted.