Didn't See That One Coming...

The announcement that NBC Sports would take over all of ESPN’s NASCAR races and half of the six on Turner was a surprise, but what was really shocking was the price tag.

Sports Business Daily reported today that NBC would pay $4.4 billion over 10 years for the rights to the final 20 NASCAR Sprint Cup Series and the final 19 NASCAR Nationwide Series events. That’s $1.6 billion more than ESPN/Turner paid over their eight-year deals, a 36% increase.

Add on a reported 30% increase in the total FOX Sports will pay for their half of the coverage, and you have serious coinage headed to NASCAR’s coffers. Of course, 65% of the total goes to the tracks, 25% to the purse and 10% to NASCAR, using the traditional carve-up, so NASCAR is due $440 million over the 10 years just from NBC.  The purse is funded at $1.1 billion, and the tracks get a combined $2.86 billion.

These numbers are not solid, but they are in the ballpark, unless NASCAR has drastically changed the way it carves up TV rights fees.

Given that viewership—across all sports except the NFL, mind you—has been down for sporting events n TV for the past several years, I thought it would go the other way. Based on that, I assumed that a $2.48 billion TV package would be about right.

I was wrong.

More money is a problem all of us, at one time or another, would be happy to try and solve. More money in this case means better things for the sport.