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NASCAR has perception problems – with fans, with the media (especially its own), and with the mainstream. It’s something I’ve written about twice (here and here). After spending what I’m sure was a lot of money on consultants, I think NASCAR finally believes it too – and they’re doing something about it.

This week they announced the reorganization of their communications department. According to Sports Business Journal:

Members of the communications team will be embedded in other departments, such as consumer, brand and corporate marketing, in an effort to broaden and help NASCAR’s communications efforts evolve both inside the sanctioning body and with the sport’s teams, tracks and sponsors.

What this means is NASCAR is going to be adding more PR people, what SBJ said could be 20 to the existing department of about 25, and hiring a chief communications officer. Among other things, this will, in theory, allow them to do a better job of shifting and crafting a more positive narrative for the sport. And lets be honest, the narrative has gotten away from them.

Right or wrong, we’re entrenched in a media environment that focuses heavily on the negative. I personally believe this has been the main contributing factor to the malaise among NASCAR fans – as Ed Hinton put it, NASCARmyalgia.

With the amount of negative coverage (and seemingly no coherent communications strategy from NASCAR), fans are just feeling down on the sport. There really isn’t one explanation either.  I refer you back to the Ed Hinton article. Pretty much all of the comments on the NASCAR PR story on SceneDaily.com went a little like this: “The product stinks. We don’t need NASCAR to spin things for us.”  It sounds good to say, but I’m not sure what there is to improve about the product (no one really articulated that). Maybe make the car look better? Shorten races?

I’m really at a loss for what’s so bad right now. I think a lot of people are. I certainly see issues, but I understand there have and always will be things wrong with NASCAR (just like every other sport). Nothing’s perfect. What I think we can improve on is how we talk about the sport.

For all NASCAR hopes to accomplish with this reorganization I think changing that conversation has got to be one of the top priorities. NASCAR is presenting a good product week in and week out, but if people aren’t seeing it, or interested in it, it really doesn’t matter.

We’ll see in the coming seasons whether this actually makes a difference, but it’s interesting to see how NASCAR is trying to improve things.

Oh, and if you need a job it sounds like NASCAR will soon be hiring…

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I think I should probably just start a problem series. I have been writing about it a lot lately. But I digress…

At the beginning of the season many in the media would have had you believing the world was crashing in on us. They were predicting empty race tracks, fleeing sponsors and failing teams.

Well six months into the year and four months into the season, things aren’t quite as bad as many predicted. Sure a couple teams have folded (the No. 8 car and No. 28 car), the independents are starting to struggle, and sponsors aren’t quite clamoring to spend tens of millions of dollars in the sport, but are things really that bad?

For the last several months everyone has been screaming about television ratings. Yeah they’re down, but if you look at them compared to other sporting events and programming, the sport really isn’t doing too bad. I unfortunately don’t have easy access to the Nielsen ratings, so I am working with what I can find online, but consider this: an average NASCAR race (not the 500 or another big race) does just as well as the NBA Finals did last year. They averaged about 9 million viewers.

That number is also big enough to beat a lot of primetime programming on major networks (not including Greys Anatomy or CSI of course). It also beats the hell out of the top rated cable programming.

Take a look at some older Nielson ratings and compare it to NASCAR this year. They’re down, but they’re no means bad.

The Chicken Littles are also pointing to the down attendance at the tracks. Now if you take the track estimations and subtract 30 to 40,000 (which is probably closer to the truth at some of these places) they are still nothing to scoff at. Any sport would give anything to have 100,000+ fans at their events every week. NASCAR is crying about it.

Sure it’s not the sell-out crowds we got just a few years ago, but still it is very good. The Super Bowl this year had just over 71,000 in attendance. With the exception of some of the smaller tracks, NASCAR easily beats that week in and week out.

Now I know what you’re saying, if there was a football stadium big enough (the new Cowboys stadium perhaps) they would have NASCAR-like attendance for the Super Bowl and that’s probably true (NASCAR couldn’t hope to have the TV viewing audience though), but the fact that NASCAR does that good every week is a very good thing.

So now that we’ve established things really aren’t that bad, I ask you, what is different between this sport and others?

The answer is the negative media attention on the sport.

Baseball attendance has been down and NHL and IndyCar TV ratings have been mediocre on Versus, but you don’t hear their respective press corps bashing the sport. In fact it’s quite the opposite. I have read several stories about how positive everyone is about the Versus ratings despite the fact the ratings have been cut in half for some events and how MLB is looking forward to a jump in attendance once the summer hits.

I feel like this sky is falling mentality has created a very negative perception of the sport by not only the general public but by the fans. I think much of the anxiety fans are feeling and another reason why they aren’t tuning in is the fabricated negativity. When you are reading every other day about how bad things are, or how bad things are going to be you’re going to start to believe it. I know NASCAR is attempting to combat this, but they can only do so much.

Things aren’t quite as great as they have been in previous seasons, there is no denying that, but are things really that bad?