Don't hurt yourself, Brian ...
... while patting yourself on the back too hard. Of course, in Daytona Beach, self-congratulations are routine, sort of like free donuts in the break room and leaving work early on Fridays in the summer.
One of these days, someone will finally kill and bury the 70 (or 75)-million-folks-are-NASCAR-fans lie. Jeff MacGregor tried. David Poole tried, too, but his column from 2006 seems to have vanished into the ether. (I linked to it here, but the link's dead.) Yes, NASCAR has its fans, but 75 million? Depends on how well you can stretch the definition of the word "fan." It's about as elastic as NASCAR's rulebook.
There's no doubt that NASCAR TV ratings are suffering. This year's audience for the Coke 600, for instance, was down 12 percent from last year. And TV ratings have been down pretty much all year. This year's rating was a 4.5. If my math's right (one rating point = 1.114 million households), that's about 5 million homes with the TV turned on. Nielsen doesn't seem to translate that transparently into viewers, but let's assume 1.5 per house, and that's somewhere in the 7.5 million range. (See what I mean about the 75-million-fans lie? How could 90 percent of your alleged fan base miss one of the bigger races of the year?)
Anyway, let's put this in context since I'm on a roll. NASCAR's 4.5 rating for the Coke 600 was 0.2 better than for the much more hyped Indy 500. It was the seventh straight year that the NASCAR race has out-rated the Indy race.
And consider poor hockey, which has long considered itself the nation's fourth team sport. Here's AP:
NEW YORK (AP) - Anaheim's 3-2 victory over Ottawa in the opener of the Stanley Cup finals got a 0.72 cable rating on Versus and was watched in 523,000 households in the United States.
Wednesday night's game 2? The audience shrank. A 0.6 cable rating is the equivalent of you, me and the dog huddling around the set, and only one of us, most likely the dog, is actually awake.
I'm not sure there's a point to all of this. Maybe I'm a little hacked that Newsweek gives Brian France some prime real estate in its magazine, then doesn't blink when he trots out the 75 million line.
Anyway, chew over the above. (If you don't feel like it, I don't blame you - it's Friday, and writing that made my head hurt.) Or go check out the Dude, who's got himself one of them fancy new blog places. Good for him.
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