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NASCAR Ratings: TV Viewership Drops for Ryan Blaney’s Thrilling Daytona Win
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- NASCAR Ratings: TV Viewership Drops for Ryan Blaney’s Thrilling Daytona Win
Ryan Blaney delivered one of the best finishes of the NASCAR season on Saturday night in the Coke Zero Sugar 400, capping off one of the best races at Daytona International Speedway in several years. Unfortunately for NBC, the TV ratings didn't reflect how good the race was.
As reported by Adam Stern of the Sports Business Journal, Saturday night's Coke Zero 400 generated a 1.76 rating and averaged 3.297 million viewers for NBC. That is a dip from the 3.5 million viewers and 1.95 rating from last season's Saturday night race at Daytona.
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It's a bit surprising that a battle for two playoff spots on a track that could've delivered an upset winner fared worse than Harrison Burton's win last season at Daytona. It also came just a week after Austin Dillon's impressive playoff-clinching win at Richmond Raceway, a race that 83.1 percent of fans voted as a good race in Jeff Gluck's weekly poll .
However, there have been growing frustrations among racing fans this season. The Next Gen car has resulted in races on superspeedways that are far less entertaining. NASCAR is also just a few weeks removed from Shane van Gisbergen winning his fourth consecutive race on a road course, with all of those non-competitive races coming within weeks of each other this summer.
Related: Denny Hamlin Blames Bubba Wallace for Big Daytona Crash
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Saturday night's race still drew the second-highest ratings for all sporting events on broadcast television over the last week, only finishing behind the PGA Tour Championship. However, with the NFL schedule set to kick off in September, NBC was certainly hoping for a bigger draw.
The NASCAR playoff schedule begins on Sunday night, with the first race in the Round of 16 at Darlington being broadcast on USA Network at 3 p.m. PT/6 p.m. ET. Fortunately for USA, it has another week until it will be competing directly with NFL Sundays.
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