Oilpressure

One thing that has sort of gone under the radar this IndyCar offseason is the TV contract that expires at the end of next season. To be honest, I had forgotten about it until Marshall Pruett of Racer.com posted an article about it this past Tuesday.

There was no new information in the article, just some quotes from Penske Entertainment President regarding how great a partner NBC has been, and how much he has been traveling to meetings in Los Angeles and New York. The article did not mention who the meetings are with.

I’m curious who fans want to broadcast the NTT IndyCar Series after the 2024 season.

Fans in any sport are very fickle. This time a year ago, Tennessee Titans coach Mike Vrabel was the toast of Nashville. The season before, the Titans wee the top-seed in the AFC playoffs. This time last year, the Titans were 7-4 and looked like a cinch to win the division and make the playoffs for the fourth straight year. Since then, the Titans have gone 4-13 – the equivalent of a full seventeen game season.; and the fans are ready to run him out of town.

Three hours to the east, the Tennessee Vols had just completed a 10-2 regular season, after almost twenty years of wandering in the wilderness, after winning the 1998 National Championship. They went on to soundly defeat Clemson in the Orange bowl, putting a period on an 11-3 season – their first eleven-win season since 2001. This year, the Vols slipped to 8-4. Fans are already talking about the possibilities of the next coach. Vol fans have very short memories on where Tennessee was just three years ago (3-7, in the COVID shortened season of 2020).

IndyCar fans have short memories also. Less than a decade ago, we were subjected to the lackluster coverage of ABC/ESPN for five races per season – including the Indianapolis 500. Fans considered NBCSN as the bar that ABC should be measured against. Fans yearned to have the Indianapolis 500 broadcast by NBC, who they knew would do a superb job.

Fans got their wish, when NBC won the rights to be the exclusive broiadcast partner for the entire IndyCar season, beginning in 2019. It didn’t take long for the bloom to fall off of the rose. In late 2018, NBC announced plans to put all practices and qualifying on their sports streaming service – NBC Sports Gold, for a cost of about $50 per year for IndyCar content only.

Fans were outraged. For the first time, fans could watch a professionally produced practice session, instead of watching stationary cameras on You Tube, with the radio network piped in for commentary. I was a fan of NBC Sports Gold, but I was in the minority. Before broadcasting their first race of the 2019 season, NBC was already in the doghouse with fans. Fans claimed they were boycotting because they were so upset, but the ratings did not seem to slip.

A year earlier, fans couldn’t wait until NBC covered their first Indianapolis 500. By the time May of 2019 rolled around, NBC had already become the broadcasting villain. Some actually clamored for the return on Scott Goodyear and Eddie Cheever to the booth. There were complaints about too many commercials, Leigh Diffey screaming and Paul Tracy’s politics.

Personally, I couldn’t believe what I was reading or hearing. Did these people not remember how much they hated ABC’s coverage, and griped about it constantly?

Things didn’t improve when Peacock was launched, and NBC moved all practices, qualifying and a race to the streaming service. They paid no attention to the fact that some seasons, as many as fourteen of the seventeen races were on Big NBC. In rare cases, fans were incensed that a race went too long on NBC and had to be moved to CNBC. My thinking was – just be glad there is aplace to move it to. Not every broadcast partner has multiple outlets.

Fans also forget about how ABC would join a race just as the green flag flew, or break away from a broadcast while the winner was on the cool-down lap.NBC usually has a decent pre-race show, and a fairly lengthy post-race show.

Now that the contract is up for negotiations, many fans are seeing this as the perfect opportunity to ditch NBC. If you are unhappy with the coverage that NBC has provided, I’d like to hear who people think would do a better job. Who will give us more than six hours a day of a qualify broadcast in the week of practice leading up to Qualifying for the Indianapolis 500? NBC does through Peacock, but many fans seem dug in on their stance against paying for streaming. Perhaps they don’t realize that this is the way all content is eventually going. They might as well enjoy a full week of practice while working, etc.

Who else will devote their resources top practice and qualifying? Again, you have to pay the $6 per month for Peacock, but at least you get an enormous amount of other content for that amount.

NASCAR’s Xfinity Series has gome with the CW – the same network that produced 100 Days to Indy that most fans didn’t even know if they had access to it. Is that the route you want IndyCar to go? Talk about obscurity. Do you want to go back to ESPN and get preempted by women’s golf?

Do you want multiple networks to get chunks of the season like NASCAR Cup? There are some advantages to that, but even astute fans have a hard time remembering where to tune and when.

If you can’t already tell, I’m rooting for NBC to retain exclusive rights to continue to broadcast IndyCar races. This isn’t my usual “Change is Bad” stance. I truly believe that it is the best possible broadcast partner for IndyCar. If CBS got it, how many races do you think would be sent off to CBS Sports Network of the Paramount Streaming app?

NBC is not perfect. They have some flaws in their broadcasts, but show me a broadcast partner who doesn’t. I feel like they are about as close to perfect as IndyCar fans can expect. While it’s nice to think that everyone loves IndyCar racing as much as I do, I am realistic enough to know that is not the case. This is still a niche sport. It is growing ever so slowly, but not enough to put it on the same level as NASCAR, and certainly not in the same stratosphere as the NFL.

IndyCar is showing life, and I attribute a lot of that to NBC and the coverage they provide. I hope that Miles and the powers-that-be at Penske Entertainment will do whatever is reasonably possible, to continue IndyCar’s relationship with NBC beyond the 2024 season. I just hope some of the fickle fans out there realize it.

George Phillips

This entry was posted on December 1, 2023 at 4:03 am and is filed under IndyCar. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.