 Screenshot by Julian Spivey
Every year during the broadcast of the Daytona 500, which has been broadcast by Fox every year since 2007 and three of the six years before that, you could probably see the same joke on social media feeds (and made among friends before that). “Daytona 500 Commercials – am I right?” It’s a joke made because commercial breaks are a major nuisance to fans watching NASCAR from home because, unless they are during a caution break, you are missing the action. Auto racing, which NASCAR is the most popular form of in America, is the only sport truly affected by commercials when it comes to missing the action. Baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, tennis, etc. all have either natural breaks that allow for commercials or what’s known as TV timeouts to accommodate commercials. Professional golf will continue through commercials, but networks have gotten so good about pre-taping shots and effortlessly cutting them into the live broadcast that it’s not problematic. In NASCAR – and other forms of racing like IndyCar – commercial breaks are often problematic, especially when they’re being shown on average every nine laps during a sport’s biggest event as was the case during the Daytona 500 on Fox on Sunday, February 19. And that average was actually aided by the network airing the majority of the final 20 percent of the race commercial-free. During the race and after the race on Sunday the actual event and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. winning the race seemed to play second fiddle to complaining about the number of commercial breaks and action missed by fans as a result. Many of the complaints I saw were via Twitter, which is certainly a medium where you’re prone to see much complaining, but that doesn’t mean the complaints or wrong or unwarranted. It’s a sport and a broadcaster of that sport’s number one priority to please its fan base. According to the Twitter user @GPLapsJake, the 2023 Daytona 500 featured 23 commercials breaks, accounting for 78 total laps (of the 200-lap race) missed with 58 of those being green flag laps (while racing at speed or actual action was taking place). This means 29 percent of the green flag racing during the sport’s biggest event was either completely missed by fans or shown on a side-by-side small screen with commercials beside it. @GPLapsJake compared these numbers to past races broadcast by Fox and found that the numbers were nearly the same throughout the network’s run with the race – but he did admit “somehow feels so much worse now.” It certainly does feel much worse now and there are many reasons for this, I believe, and I’ll get into some of the reasons why I believe this to be the case. A) Attention spans are getting shorter. This point doesn’t interest me a whole lot but it’s true. According to a CNN article, Dr. Gloria Mark, professor of informatics at the University of California – Irvine, has studied how digital media impacts our lives. Mark found that in 2004 the average attention span on a screen was 2 ½ minutes. Years later, they found it had slipped to about 75 seconds. Now she finds the average to be 47 seconds. B) We don’t view television the same way we did two decades ago. In 2001, the first Daytona 500 broadcast on Fox, we had just one option. We had to watch the race live (or record it on a VHS!) and we had to take it the way the network gave it to us. So, if we missed 35.50 percent of the race, as @GPLapsJake figured up, that year we knew no better. That was the way TV worked and it had always been that way. But it wouldn’t be too long before innovations came around in DVRs that allowed us to realize we didn’t have to put up with the annoyance of commercials anymore. In 2001, commercials were just a way of life. In 2023, they’re seen as something that can and should be avoided. I’ve been so annoyed by commercials during NASCAR events (and at times boring competition on the track – which was aided a lot in 2022 by the new Next Gen Racecar) that I began DVRing races a few years ago and waiting 90 minutes to two hours before starting so I could fast-forward through these nuisances. I understand, though, many fans don’t want to watch races this way. C) We’ve seen it doesn’t have to be this way. There has been a much talked about boom over the last few years about the rising popularity of Formula 1 among American audiences, despite the fact that most of the events in that series are held in countries across the globe with time zones that see many races held in the wee hours of the morning or rarely in what are accustomed normal sporting event viewing times in America. ESPN, the broadcaster of F1 races in America but uses the Britain-based Sky Sports feed for coverage, airs all of the F1 races commercial-free. Sure, F1 races are generally about half of the broadcast time of a NASCAR race, which honestly probably has also aided in its boom among American audiences, but we’ve seen it can still be done. People within the sport swear NASCAR can’t be broadcast in the same way due to broadcasting expenses. Fox NASCAR play-by-play commentator Mike Joy told a fan on Twitter: “It’s a fraction of the cost of televising NASCAR Cup on Fox, NBC, FS1 and USA” when asked about ESPN’s F1 coverage, though he didn’t explain the reasons why. But all fans truly see here is that it’s being done elsewhere, and it should be done for NASCAR – and in 2023 fans should have the right to see more than just 71% of the event’s action. Even if NASCAR broadcasters could utilize the side-by-side method more often or better yet completely it would be bucket loads better than currently. D) It doesn’t help that the broadcasters don’t seem to care. One of the worst things you can do if you’re a sport or the broadcaster of the sport is to make the fans, upset already, feel like they’re wrong for being upset or like they don’t have the right to be upset. And I saw this time and time again from NASCAR on Fox commentators and others affiliated with the sport like former Texas Motor Speedway President Eddie Gossage and Cup Series spotter Freddie Kraft on Twitter on Monday, the day after the race. The easiest way to lose a fan is to act like their complaints don’t matter, but it feels like NASCAR on Fox commentators have taken the overall Rupert Murdoch/Fox News policy of gaslight, gaslight, gaslight when it comes to the wave of complaints about the broadcast on Sunday – and there were more complaints about the broadcast besides the commercials, but that was the biggest irritant for sure. All sports are trying to figure out how to fit into the modern world. This has led to numerous changes from minor to major in a multitude of sports, for instance, baseball is trying to speed the game up in hopes of appealing to more and younger viewers. NASCAR’s current TV deal ends after the 2024 season and the sport desperately needs to figure out ways to appeal to modern TV audiences and younger audiences, as well. Beaucoups of commercials are not going to be the way to make this happen. Fox Sports’ coverage of the sport, in general, is not a great way to make it happen either – but that’s perhaps a story for another time.
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