Adding Two Games To The NFL Season Could Hurt Other Sports, Especially NASCAR
Friday, March 27, 2009
One of the only redeeming things about February, once Football ends, is Daytona week/weekend. Well the NFL owners have been discussing a lot of things as of late, but the most intriguing ones is the potential to add two NFL games. That move would subsequently cause the Super Bowl to be pushed back....straight to the same spot as the Daytona 500.
The Daytona 500 starts earlier in the day than the Super Bowl, but the big hit would come in the form of advertising dollars. The number of companies using both venues would certainly decrease, especially if you consider the start of the Super Bowl would come right at the end of the race, and this has NASCAR officials reeling. Via Scene Daily....
NASCAR and Fox Sports officials are in a wait-and-see mode before commenting on what NASCAR would do, but it seems likely that the date for the Daytona 500 would have to change.As mentioned above, it would only makes sense to move the Daytona 500 back, but that would certainly throw a wrench in the plans of few hundred thousand who attend the race and the millions who enjoy both events. It'll be interesting to see what NASCAR decides....and how quickly.
“I don’t think I can make a definitive answer to [changing the date], but I would have a hard time today seeing how that would work for everybody – working for the media partners, working for the sponsors that we share and quite frankly, working for the fan and the consumer base,” said Roger VanDerSnick, senior vice president for marketing and business operations for DIS parent company International Speedway Corp.
“I understand the NASCAR base pretty well, and there’s a fair amount of overlap. So why make that an issue when I think we’ve got several options so that it wouldn’t be?”
Daytona 500 date change likely if NFL moves Super Bowl to traditional 500 weekend (Scene Daily)
14 Comments:
wouldn't bother me since I hate Nascar and find it boring- longer NFL season>Nascar
Nascar is on it's way down anyway. Fewer and fewer people give a rip and companies can't afford the over the top sponsorship dollars.
In two words....screw Nascar
come on PayDirt, really? And overlap the Pro Bowl?
I'm probably in the minority here, but I don't really think it's necessary to add more games to the NFL season.
BHill, you are exactly right. It's dying. You may say it's because of the economy, I say it's because Kyle Busch is a bag of dicks.
"I'm probably in the minority here, but I don't really think it's necessary to add more games to the NFL season."
Agreed, walnuts. I actually tend to think that the NFL season goes on too long with too many meaningless games. If anything, they should play 14 or 13 games instead of 18.
Christ, shoot me if that happens (because when it does, it just means that they'll talk about other sports even less on TV).
I thought the point of adding regular season games was gettting rid of preseason ones. Why not just start the season two weeks earlier then?
No reason for it to drag on forever.
Digger Phelps saying "He can step out and shit."
If the NFL expands to an 18-game schedule, the logical thing is to convert one pre-season game to regular season, and add a week to the end. Daytona is currently 2 weeks after the Super Bowl, so it wouldn't matter. If the NFL added 2 weeks, Daytona could go on the off week before the SB, or, more likely, NASCAR would push Daytona back a week, and trim a race from the schedule - probably by closing 1 track (Martinsville? Darlington?), assigning 1 race to Kentucky, and dropping the other. With sponsorship dollars harder to come by and team budgets dropping, having one less date on the calendar might not be the worst thing.
The number of races NASCAR has is already way too high -- they overlap almost the first two months of the NFL season anyway. And, like others have mentioned, their costs are way too high for this economy and probably need to do some cost-cutting.
As for the NFL, it's long been noted that pre-season basically sucks and that teams should just outright play. Adjusting pre-season seems to be the most viable option. The big issue for them is that they can't keep players healthy for the normal season, and it only gets worse the longer the season goes on.
Mats, if they start a week earlier like it sounds like you're suggesting, that would be labor day weekend. Up until 5 or 6 years ago, the NFL started on the holiday weekend, but moved the start back a week later due to poor ratings that first week. I think they will be reluctant to do that again.
Again, I think this is a stupid move. In years past, the end of th NFL season segued nicely to college hoops. If the season runs until mid-Feburary, most people won't get into basketball until march madness and that is a shame. It sounds like the NFL is just trying to show it supremecy over the entire sports world.
But why stop there? Why not have an NFL minor league that runs from March to July so we can have NFL football played 12 months of the year and all other sports completely forgotten.
Well the NFL decided not to screw Overtime. We cannot expect them to do 2 logical and sane things in such a short period of time. So yeah they will be dumb and add games. Because after all injuries don't play enough of a role in the NFL.
I wouldn't like it if Nascar had to move the daytona 500 from it's traditional 3rd sunday in February date. and besides I'm more of a nascar fan then football fan anyway. and also if the nfl does add one or two more games and have a 17, 18 game schedule it's gonna get more and more physical and rougher on the players. and could possibly shortern up careers trying to be in game shape if the preseason games got shortended to 2.
Why don't they just move it up to the week between the conference championships and the super bowl, its one of the slowest sports weekends in the year