Off-Season TV Landscape Looking Bleak

Like most major professional sports, NASCAR has an organization that catalogues all the race footage from the season. The NASCAR Media Group has lots of Emmy Awards and lots of toys to play with where TV is concerned.

This is the time of the year when the post-season TV landscape gets the once-over from TDP. Right now, the results look pretty bleak. There will be the mandatory season-in-review shows aired for each series in November. Last year these shows were buried in bad timeslots and never really got any attention. Then, once the three NASCAR banquets finish, things slow down to a crawl.

In terms of using TV series like NASCAR Confidential or Dale Junior's Shifting Gears to handle some post-season content, the answer is no. Best of RaceDay? No. Best of TWIN? No. Best of Krista Voda's hats? That one is in development and looking for a sponsor.

It appears that there is no post-season NASCAR anything scheduled on the ESPN networks right now. After a while, the racing footage reverts back to the NASCAR Media Group. It really comes down to this group and the NASCAR TV partners planning in advance for some off-season specials. Those could range from Humpy Wheeler interviews to edited race highlights with new reactions from the participants.

SPEED stepped-up to the plate and produced some testing coverage in January, but that is not the same as long-form edited or live programming that covers the sport in the way it used to be covered.

Apparently, there will be no end-of-season roundtables with NASCAR journalists, no final all-NASCAR Wind Tunnel special and no final grouping of the TV personalities who worked all season long to bring the fans NASCAR coverage.

This is where NASCAR really misses a TV network that they can control. The current NASCAR TV partners have different agendas that include multi-network sports distribution, lifestyle programming and even primetime TV dramas. Did you know that Kyra Sedgwick was The Closer? To these networks, NASCAR is just another programming series that comes and goes.

Meanwhile, the NFL network has a full slate of programming all summer long. The Golf Channel has a blast during the off-season and the Tennis Channel takes the time to review the year for several professional series. Now, both the NHL and Major League Baseball are about to join that list with top-flight television professionals in charge of HD Networks that are going to be exciting to watch.

NASCAR is over fifty years old. Its rich history sits in one geographic area of the country as does almost all the high-tech racing shops and equipment suppliers. The stories of the Lee Petty generation may be gone, but men like Harry Gant, Cale Yarborough and David Pearson are alive and well. They are just waiting to tell a new generation of fans about how it used to be when full-size cars without power steering were wrestled around legendary tracks by real men.

This is the second season of the new NASCAR TV contract and the second time for the fans to hear the off-season excuses of all four NASCAR TV partners. No room on ESPN or ABC, Fox is busy with the NFL and TNT just does not care.

SPEED is left holding the bag, as usual. That network only ordered six NASCAR Confidential episodes, never got the Humpy Show off the ground and has a major swing to lifestyle programming as its top agenda.

So, enjoy the next several weeks as The Chase nears the finish. TDP will keep updating the TV schedule for the three banquets and the year-in-review shows. It appears that once again this season when the checkered flag waves at Homestead, it also waves on almost all NASCAR TV programming until 2009.

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Evernham becomes ESPN's New Wild Card

Veteran NASCAR journalist Dustin Long has been a frequent guest on Tradin' Paint this season. Long writes for several newspapers and is very good at expressing his views on TV.

This weekend, he wrote a column that contained one of the hottest topics where NASCAR TV and the viewers are concerned. It is a topic that always brings a ton of email and comments for a wide variety of reasons. That topic is Ray Evernham.

This year, ESPN introduced Evernham in February as a part-time member of the NASCAR on ESPN team. He has quietly been used in almost every role possible this season.

Evernham has been added as the fourth person in the Infield Studio as a commentator. He has been upstairs in the announce booth as an analyst. Viewers have seen him as a panelist on Monday's one hour NASCAR Now roundtable with Allen Bestwick. He has appeared on ESPNEWS and other ESPN programs talking about NASCAR as an expert.

You can read Long's column by clicking here. Below is the excerpt that got the attention of so many NASCAR fans.

Ray Evernham, who has a minority share in Gillett Evernham Motorsports, said he was not involved in the decision to release rookie Patrick Carpentier. Evernham stressed he's a minority partner in the team and hinted maybe that role could change to not being a part of the team.

"That's largely up to the Gillettes,'' Evernham said if he would remain with the team. "I want to help Mr. Gillette, and I'll do whatever I can to help him be successful, but I also want to pursue ... I'm enjoying my life at ESPN. I'm enjoying a little bit of semi-retirement. I want to help as much as I can, but I also want to make sure I have credibility with the viewers and that's important to me.''

Some folks feel that the real reason Evernham needs to keep his credibility with the ESPN viewers is because that is his next employment destination. Evernham created Race Wizard a while back, an ESPN2 series that featured Evernham's son Ray J. and offered explanations on various NASCAR topics with a family-friendly theme. That program did not return for this season.

Instead, ESPN slipped Evernham under the radar and brought him in-house for some additional TV exposure. There was no doubt that ESPN faced a tough situation. Evernham was still on paper a multi-car owner in the very series on which ESPN has asked him to comment.

Now, Evernham seems to be sending clear signals that he is no longer involved in the day-to-day operations at GEM. Amazingly, that comes at a time when ESPN is within weeks of ending that network's NASCAR coverage for 2008. Remember, in TV there is rarely such a thing as a coincidence.

Click here for the Yahoo! Sports post that addressed the TDP coverage of the Evernham issue. The topic was how Evernham consistently got a free pass from Allen Bestwick on GEM issues during the Monday NASCAR Now program. Evernham seems to have tried to answer just that question with his comments to Long.

Update: Evernham addressed the Carpentier issue on the Monday edition of NASCAR Now and basically repeated what he said to Long.

It should be interesting to watch carefully how Evernham is used in the final month or so of the NASCAR on ESPN season. What role Evernham will play for ESPN in 2009 has yet to be revealed, but it is clear that he is the former crew chief in favor at the moment.

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TWIN Responds To The Fans Once Again

It certainly must be interesting to be the Producer of This Week In NASCAR on SPEED. This Monday night show gets a lot of scrutiny for many reasons. In one form or another, it has been on SPEED for over a decade with Michael Waltrip as the last remaining original member of the "expert panel."

This Monday, Waltrip was joined by Greg Biffle and host Steve Byrnes to walk viewers through an hour of reviewing and previewing the NASCAR races. When this TV series began back in February, SPEED had the brilliant idea of putting the preview of the next race first and holding the highlights and discussion of the Sunday race until the second half of each show.

Needless to say, this did not fly with the fans for a lot of reasons. Spending thirty minutes talking about a race that was five days away was tough to take. By the time the "expert panel" came around to the weekend race, the wind was out of the sails on this program.

SPEED finally relented and moved the Sprint Cup race review to the top of the show. The results were immediate. The hot topics were being discussed right away. The dynamic between the panelists improved and this lively conversation seemed to lead perfectly into a preview of the next race. Problem solved.

After the name change from Inside NEXTEL Cup to This Week In NASCAR, the program also included highlights of the support races from the weekend. Nationwide and Truck Series highlights gave these two series a well-deserved moment in the sun.

By the time The Chase officially started, TWIN was going at full-speed and the shows were well received. Then, something interesting happened. Suddenly, SPEED decided that the very same viewers who had watched this series all season long needed to be introduced to the drivers in The Chase.

So, TWIN changed the program format again. After a brief discussion with the two panelists and before any highlights, Byrnes introduced a two-segment-long edited feature on one of The Chase drivers. The result was that both the Nationwide and Truck Series highlights were booted-off the program permanently because the show was now out of time.

Was TWIN chasing the elusive casual fan who did not know who Dale Earnhardt Jr., Greg Biffle or Tony Stewart was? Were they trying to show-off the production skills of The NASCAR Media Group who gets to follow the drivers around for the weekend? The bottom line question is, who made that decision?

Since the beginning of this new issue, TDP readers have been expressing how much they are confused by this magazine-style feature. This week TWIN responded by changing the program format yet again. This time, the Sprint Cup review and highlights came first and the big Chase feature came second.

Brynes led a focused Biffle and a laid-back Waltrip through the Charlotte highlights and both drivers made good points during this segment. Biffle was especially effective as he saw some incidents for the first time on video and reflected on what he saw first-hand during the race.

For the first time in a long time, Biffle sounded like a driver seeking a championship. TWIN has experienced panelists who won races, but having the Sprint Cup champ on the show would be a huge bonus.

It was unfortunate that the big Chase profile featured the same NASCAR personality who was on the E:60 program on ESPN earlier this year. This time, no Chaser was front-and-center despite the feature being called a Chase profile.

Humpy Wheeler was interesting as always and there is no doubt that he must have his own weekly program in 2009. That NASCAR resource is going to waste without a platform to communicate with the fans and whatever TV network steps-up and makes Wheeler a deal is going to get a goldmine.

This week's fan email questions were outstanding, but the year is 2008 and TWIN needs to get videos from the fans and let them ask their own questions. If TWIN can post bonus segments on NASCAR.com after every show, they certainly can change the decade-old mailbag over to an Internet video format. That would also allow those questions and answers to live-on as a reference on the NASCAR.com website.

The Nationwide Series put on a good show at Charlotte and next week the Craftsman Trucks will race at Martinsville. It is a shame that neither event was reviewed or previewed even briefly on this program. It takes away from the purpose of this TV series as a whole.

TWIN is coming down the home-stretch of the first season and has proven to be a winning franchise for SPEED once again. Perhaps, the production staff will find a way to strike a compromise between these big Chase features and some Nationwide and Truck Series highlights.

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