Happy Valentine's Day

Happy Valentine's Day to all of our loyal female readers. Thanks for putting up with us for the last several years. Since we are once again about to embark on another season of talking NASCAR TV, we are letting this day rest in complete peace.

As you ponder the upcoming racing season, I wonder if perhaps you have a NASCAR Valentine's Day wish you might choose to pass along. Have a great day!

A New York State Of Mind

Update: Tuesday morning NBC Sports Talk confirmed it had booked Danica Patrick and will be opening the door for NASCAR content. Great news.

The conversion of VERSUS TV into the NBC Sports Network is complete. The concept behind sinking tens of millions of dollars into creating a major cable sports network is easy to understand. NBC wants a piece of what ESPN already has.

In addition to working hard on buying the rights to live events and promoting the Olympic agenda, one piece of the ESPN pie is already under attack. Despite airing for more than twelve hours daily on several ESPN networks, SportsCenter has become a parody of itself.

Originally intended to be a way to effectively get highlights out to sports fans nationwide, time has long since left this concept behind. While the 1980's were tailor-made for distributing sports highlights via cable TV, technology has changed the entire sports media landscape.

SportsCenter now uses a seemingly endless cast of in-house experts to try and entice fans to spend time watching cable TV. It's a tough sell. Smart phones, laptops and an endless number of league and team websites offer the same video content with even more official footage and information.

The SportsCenter franchise worked best when it was limited in time on the air and driven by memorable anchor personalities. Now, it's a TV factory and has much the same feel as watching CNN Headline News (HLN). After a while, it's obvious the same content is being played-back off the hard-drives with different faces reading the teleprompter.

As NASCAR fans know, the struggle we have detailed for the past six years is the inability of SportsCenter to integrate NASCAR content into the mix. Whether airing a preview, conducting a live interview or showing highlights, the animosity between many of the SportsCenter anchors and NASCAR is plain to see.

It's still a badge of honor to be anti-NASCAR in Bristol.

NBC Sports Network's daily news show is called SportsTalk. Anchored at 6PM by Russ Thaler, the one-hour weekday series focuses on the exact same content as SportsCenter. That is Thaler pictured above on the left with Pro Football Talk's Mike Florio. The twist on SportsTalk is in the diversity of personalities on the program.

Thaler draws not only from the heavy-hitters at NBC like Bob Costas, but also from diverse sources like Sports Illustrated, Yahoo! Sports and the Comcast regional sports networks. Where SportsCenter is limited to the ESPN family, SportsTalk is thriving by including rather than excluding journalists and reporters. There are, however, some growing pains.

Last week, there was not a word about NASCAR on the SportsTalk program. Michael Phelps and Misty May-Treanor stopped by to push the Olympic agenda while journalists of all kinds talked stick-and-ball sports non-stop.

While ESPN is deeply invested in the Red Sox, Yankees and now Tim Tebow, NBC is even more deeply furrowed into its own sports cave. Where NBC Sports is concerned, it's a New York state of mind. That's New York City for those of you without a Billy Joel CD in your collection.

Click here for the NBC Sports homepage. NASCAR can be found by going to the "More" tab, then the "Motorsports" tab and finally the "More on NASCAR" section at the bottom of the page. The most updated story not from a wire service is on Dale Earnhardt Jr. being named most popular driver. Don't click on it, because the link has long since been removed.

If NBC wants the new NBC Sports Network and the flagship SportsTalk show to be taken seriously, there had better be some effort put into freshening the NASCAR content in a timely fashion. The sport is coming off its most successful championship title fight in years and boasts a diverse group of ongoing stories as the season gets underway.

There was a time when NASCAR fans had fond memories of NBC. It was 2006 when the network parted with the sport after a six year run. Now, the challenge for the new-look NBC Sports Network executives is to reach out far beyond the Hudson River line and create a NASCAR state of mind.

We welcome your comments on this topic. To add your opinion, just click on the comments button below. Thank you for taking the time to stop by The Daly Planet.

Evernham and Rudd Make TV Moves

When SPEED released the TV line-ups for 2012 earlier this week, one name that was missing was Ray Evernham. On the racing weekends, Evernham had been driving over to SPEED's North Charlotte studios and working as a NASCAR analyst on the SpeedCenter shows.

This concept was created and Evernham was employed during the time Patti Wheeler was in charge of SPEED's programming and production departments. Wheeler left the network in December amid a senior management shake-up. Now, Evernham has followed her out the door.

SPEED confirmed that Evernham is out and that former Sprint Cup Series driver Ricky Rudd is in. This name came from out of the blue, as Rudd has never been active in NASCAR TV. He has no website, no Facebook page and no Twitter account. Perhaps, that is exactly the kind of "old school" mentality that some fans might embrace.

"Anytime you add someone with Ricky’s credentials, you give the viewers a voice and a perspective that has real impact," said SPEED President Scott Ackerson in a media release.

"I’m really looking forward to the next chapter," said Rudd, the 1977 Rookie of the Year. "It’s going to be a lot of fun working with the gang at SPEED." His first show in the studio with host Adam Alexander will be this Sunday.

Evernham continues to be just as interesting away from the track as he was in his crew chief and owner days. Click here for ESPN reporter David Newton's story on Evernham settling his lawsuit with former partner George Gillett.

In the last paragraph, Newton adds that Evernham has not ruled out a return to TV. We believe that is exactly the case. The buzz is that Evernham will be back on ESPN starting with the Daytona coverage.

"Evernham Issue Getting Tougher" was a TDP column from September of 2008. Evernham's star was rising at ESPN, but there was an issue that remained. It wasn't very hard to imagine what that topic might be.

This from the 2008 post:

Many things have changed since February and one of them is now very tough to take. When Evernham is on ESPN, the questions and issues that he deals with involve everything about NASCAR except one topic. That topic is Gillett-Evernham Motorsports (GEM).

Over the last couple of weeks there has been a nasty GEM lawsuit involving Robby Gordon, rumors of GEM buying another race team and also GEM moving to Toyota for 2009. This week, Patrick Carpentier has been told by GEM that he is out at the end of the season. Tuesday, Mike Delahanty, the Sr. Motorsports Manager at Dodge actually jumped-into a NASCAR media conference call to try and quell rumors of problems with Dodge and GEM.

While Evernham might talk about his cars and his teams during the race highlights, there is a code of silence at ESPN where Evernham is concerned that is simply not fair to NASCAR fans. Like all the other owners, Evernham should be fair game and he is not.

Now with the GEM issue behind him, Evernham's words during a recent interview with veteran NASCAR journalist Steve Waid seem to become even more clear. Click here for the full story. This is an excerpt.

"I still stay away from the motorsports side over at Hendrick Motorsports," Evernham said. "The less I know about what is going on in motorsports there, the easier it is to keep potential conflict out of it in regards to TV. I never want the teams to worry about what I might say on TV after I might have seen what they were working on. The best thing to do is keep that separate."

"Hopefully we’ll announce a new TV package in a little bit," Evernham added. "I’m going to do some TV stuff again."

Out of the pan and into the fire might be a better term. There is little doubt that Evernham's current employment at Hendrick Motorsports is going to be a hot topic in his return to TV. Even with his current involvement limited to the Hendrick Performance (non-racing) side of the business, its sure to raise some eyebrows.

Evernham has lots of irons in the fire including his ownership of East Lincoln Speedway, a car restoration business and a TV project focused on classic cars with his wife, Erin. That means his TV time will probably be limited on the NASCAR beat.

Amid the news about Evernham and Rudd, SPEED slipped in the fact that the network had hired former Miss Sprint Cup Monica Palumbo as a social media reporter. Rather than continue to rely on information from TV personalities sent whenever possible, Palumbo's challenge is to create an information stream on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube that continually offers current NASCAR information to fans.

There you have it. Rudd debuts on SPEED this weekend, Evernham's official announcement of rejoining ESPN is still pending and Palumbo better get a bigger battery for her Sprint phone. As always, we welcome your comments on these topics.

To add your opinion, just click on the comments button below. Thank you for taking the time to stop by The Daly Planet.