Welcome to Earnhardt Jr./Daytona 500 Conspiracy Central
Never one to let a good conspiracy go to waste, up to and including manufacturing a few myself, even I stand puzzled, amazed, hell Gobsmacked even, at the level of nuttiness that has arisen in the aftermath of the Daytona 500.
There are many examples, I’m sure you’ve seen a few in the last few days, but for the purposes of this post I’ll highlight a couple you may not have had the “pleasure” of perusing.
First up is a blog post from a well known NASCAR beat reporter who suggests the race was called early due to TV ratings.
Using data from previous 500’s that show more viewers tune in for the last hour of the broadcast he suggests either NASCAR, FoxSports or a combination of the two may have decided to yank the plug early so any potential ratings decline wouldn’t show in the overnight or final Nielson rating.
To quote this un-named pundit/beat reporter who shall go unlinked:
If Fox continued with its coverage through a rain delay of that length (a couple hours he suggests - ed), viewership would have plummeted and the whole average rating would have dropped, too. By ending the broadcast as quickly as possible, Fox minimized the loss of ratings as much as it could.
To be fair Fox had four new episodes of The Simpsons, King Of The Hill, Family Guy, and American Dad starting at 7pm that gives some air of plausibility to his theory.
But there’s another side of this coin. Would the network retain more viewership by going with it’s line-up of cartoon sitcoms or stay through the rain delay and show the race to the bitter end?
It’s possible, but the ratings for those four shows during the last week of January average about one half of the 16 million that were tuned into the race.
That would have increased with the new episodes, but to 16 million, or say a drop to 10 mil because of the rain? Damn unlikely I’d guess.
But more to the point, what to hell is a beat reporter laying out unsubstantiated, except in his own mind, crackpot theories? NASCAR Nation has enough of those without being egged on by supposedly unbised reporters of the sport.
Now, while on the subject of crackpots, I give you “Worm Dirt,” who posted the following at Scene Daily. Keep in mind this is a follow-on comment to his theory that Dale Jr. Nation is history after the escapades displayed Sunday:
Alright folks…. this is just plain SPOOKY and i’m still a little freaked out by it, but I just discovered something.Stay with me here….If you take the three lap numbers where Junior made his three most blatant mistakes yesterday(the missed pit, parking on the line, and the wreck he caused) and then multiply them by each other…..it comes out to 91,597!!!!! And if you subtract Junior’s #88 from that you get……91,509!!!!
Do you understand what that means???!?!?! Just add a couple of dashes to that number and you get 9-15-09……..which translates of course to September 15th, 2009!!!!! Or what will be known in history as……THE BEGINING OF THE END OF JUNIOR NATION!!!! NUmbers don’t lie folks. I’m sorry.
Spooky hardly covers it and I don’t mean his “mathematics.”
It’s spooky someone would dream up this cockamamie BS. How friggin’ bored does one have to be to go down that road? Mental gymnastics Gone Wild!
And even more spooky he lays it out for all the world to see.
But it is what it is, nutcakes to the left of me and nutcakes to the right of me.
“Nutcake” is a little generous, don’t you think?
Considering it was still raining at 10pm, I think the call was right (as much as I hate to admit it).
If you hadn’t guessed the reporter ref’d above is “Never Met a Buffet He Didn’t Love” Poole.
He pissed me off with the tripe he wrote. Hell, if he’d given one “un-named” source I might have let it pass.
But it’s obvious he did a cranial/rectal extraction. There’s enough negative stuff in the sport now it doesn’t need hack reporters dreaming shit up.
One should never have the same reporter covering the same beat year after year. Especially when said reporter can no longer distinguish between reporting and commentary. Or starts believing they’re the show. Not that Poole is alone in this, but he most definitely fits into that category.
You kill me… Dang,I bet ratings would have went through the floor and Fox would have went bankrupt if those shows had been interrupted.
Would you send me the link to the Worm Dirt story…I want to do a rebuttal based on REAL predictions for that day. Just for sh*ts and giggles. THX. I am too lazy to go search for it myself.
NOTE: I fixed the mis-spelling of your name, or have you legally changed it to Clabce? - marc
It’s not too difficult to believe that the TV tail wags the NASCAR dog. The fact that the race started at 3:45 p.m. on the east coast is due entirely to TV and Fox’s desire to have the race end late enough on the west coast to not lose the audience for its prime time lineup.
NASCAR is unwilling to stand up to the demands of its TV partners or crack down when they pull stupid crap like sending a race to ESPN Classic. And the sport suffers because of it.
I don’t, and won’t dispute TV’s influence with regards to race start times Doug. All the networks have stated publicly they requested and were granted permission to move to later start times.
My beef is with a reporter making something up from whole cloth. He offered nothing but speculation, no “unnamed sources,” or “sources close to FoxSports/NASCAR,” nothing but hot air expelled.
And yes, to be fair, he wrote it on a blog and not presented as something printed in the MSM. He gets some leeway in that regard, on the other hand the post in question was/is prominently displayed as part of an MSM outlet.
As ref’d in this post the basis for Fox to do what was suggested would be to gain more viewers or ad revenue by stopping the event to show their prime-time cartoon shows the debuted Sunday.
I already noted those shows had about 9 million watch them the preceding week.
Consider this, last years debacle in Fontana (scene of The Great NASCAR Flood) had just under 11 million watch on that rainy Sunday. (a venue that is universally hated)
TV execs live and die by those numbers I find it hard to believe,(short of a forthcoming admission) they would willingly trade cartoon sitcom numbers of 9-10 million for whatever Daytona’s numbers would have decreased from the 16 million figures released.
Factor in NASCAR fans loyalty to sponsors and how that translates into sales and you have - NO SALE - to his conspiracy theory in my mind.