Denny Hamlin hates that NASCAR’s recent TV ratings have been hard to swallow. But Hamlin feels the pain in two ways; he feels it not only as a driver for one of the biggest teams there is, Joe Gibbs Racing, but also as the co-owner (along with NBA legend Michael Jordan) of another major Cup team, 23XI Racing.
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Hamlin addressed the ratings slide on this week’s edition of his Actions Detrimental podcast. One of the first points he made is that, in a sense, NASCAR is stuck with its current multi-tier broadcast package for another six more years (through the 2031 season).
In other words, there’s not much NASCAR can do.
“(The ratings are) just not good,” Hamlin said. “I mean, we signed the deal that we signed. We obviously lost a significant amount of network races in this TV deal. In each one of the TV deals that we’ve signed over the last few years or the past few agreements that we’ve had, we’ve always just taken the most amount of money.”
Adding Streaming Services Has Made It Difficult for Fans To Watch NASCAR
But Hamlin inferred that part of the problem – in addition to having races on mainstays FOX Sports and NBC Sports – NASCAR is now also on the Prime TV and Peacock (owned by NBC) streaming services, as well as The CW for NASCAR Xfinity Series races (NASCAR Trucks races are all televised on FOX or its FS1 subsidiary).
“It’s not been about what’s going to put us on in the most households,” Hamlin said. “We were the guinea pigs to get channel X off the ground, channel Y off the ground, and it’s just you’re asking so much of your fans to just keep chasing you around all these different networks.”
Actually, NASCAR has been down this road before in the past. When it had its first major multi-network deal in 2001, that included FOX and NBC, which eventually segued to ABC/ESPN (which had televised the sport prior to the 2001 super deal), TNT and others, and then brought NBC back in 2015. One of the biggest complaints from fans back then – and here we are back in the same position again – was how many different networks fans had to search through to get the racing action they wanted.
In fact, at one point, if you include other subsidiary networks such as USA Network, CNBC, and MSNBC (all affiliated with NBC), there were six different networks televising parts of NASCAR racing, including Cup, Xfinity, and Trucks.
That’s one reason why so many TV schedules arose and became popular with fans because those schedules told fans where and when to look for the racing action they sought.
Hamlin: There Are Only So Many Eyeballs to Go Around
“I’m very steadfast that there’s only so many sports eyeballs,” Hamlin said. “People that love sports love sports. And sometimes, you’re just watching what’s on sports. And when the NFL has taken such a lion share of those eyes right now, record setting every single week, people just – that’s their priority. And if football is not on, then I think that you’ve got a legitimate shot of being the next in line.”
But when does the NFL have an off-weekend? It doesn’t. Sure, there are bye weeks for individual teams, but from the first part of September through early February and the Super Bowl, Sundays are wall-to-wall NFL games.
“Going head-to-head, it’s just it’s going to be a tough road,” Hamlin admitted. “We didn’t used to care about that. We used to be strong enough on our own to really not care.
“But the world has changed and again, it all comes down to shares. And if you got 100 shares of something and 90 of those shares are saying if football is on, I’m watching it. I might click between on a commercial or something, but I’m watching that. That’s my number one priority. It’s going to be hard to get any bigger than what you are unless you start taking shares.”
Hamlin even tried brainstorming ideas, like having races on Friday nights, or possibly in-week races in prime time. But that’s something NASCAR and the networks have historically been against – even though the NFL has made Monday Night Football and Thursday Night Football very successful. So why not NASCAR?
“I just feel like Sunday afternoon is just that if you built a series from scratch right now, you would not be racing 38 weeks a year,” Hamlin said. “We race entirely too much. It’s oversaturated by this time of the year. If other sports just cared about money, they’d play football 38 weekends a year, but they don’t.”
NASCAR Is Stuck In A Catch-22 That It Can’t seem to Fix
That leads to a Catch-22 for NASCAR: if they were to suddenly cut the number of races on the schedule to, say, 30 or 32 or even 34 races – rather than the 38-race schedule we have now (including the non-points All-Star Race and the preseason Bud Clash, both non-points-paying races) – that would mean NASCAR would likely have to rebate some of the nearly $8 billion it’s set to earn from the current multi-network TV deal over the remaining seven seasons starting with 2026.
And you know that’s never going to happen. In a sense, NASCAR became a victim of its own success, and now that sports fans are looking at other sports like the NFL, college football, MLB, NBA, Formula One, IndyCar, etc., it was almost inevitable that NASCAR’s TV ratings would go down.
