SBJ Media: NASCAR shifts gears on Nielsen viewership

A 90-minute call with NFL execs on the 2026 schedule wasn’t enough for me Friday, so I went back to the league to ask about where things stood with the powers that be over at the College Football Playoff. The NFL has long run games on Saturdays in December after the college regular season was finished, but now an expanded CFP has presented certain scheduling conflicts. Similar to last year, the NFL tells me that lines of communication have remained open and that certain adjustments continue to be discussed on kickoff times.

Should the CFP go to 16 or 24 teams, the playoff would most definitely continue to run into the NFL’s designs on owning that portion of the calendar every year.

Serving as Exhibit A that Nielsen Big Data is not a panacea for sports is NASCAR Cup Series coverage this season. Both sides are working through issues related to NASCAR’s data sets, and with that, NASCAR will be returning to the old panel vs. panel comparisons — and likely for the rest of the season.

The move came after a deep dive into the data, particularly around select demographics and metered markets.

It’s a decision that shifts narratives around Fox’s just-wrapped season of races. With Big Data vs. panel last year, Fox and FS1, averaging 3.3 million viewers, were down 1% for their points races (even after an 11% jump for the Daytona 500). But panel-to-panel, NASCAR would be up 1% for Fox Sports, which would have averaged 3.4 million viewers.

“We’re going to move to just to make it as apples-to-apples as possible for the balance of the year,” said Brian Herbst, NASCAR’s EVP and chief media and revenue officer. “It’s more stable. ... We are in active conversations with Nielsen on future methodology changes, particularly what’s rolling out end of August, beginning of September, with impact data, which we think will more accurately reflect kind of the audience measurement of our sport.”

Looking down a level, the NASCAR O’Reilly Auto Parts Series on the CW is up 6% to date (1.3 million average viewers), while the Craftsman Truck Series is up 19% on Fox/FS1 (667,000 viewers) as it has taken advantage of better weather this season.

CBS Sports navigated a crowded leaderboard on Sunday at the PGA Championship with 21 players within four shots of Alex Smalley’s 54-hole lead.

From 2pm ET on, CBS showed 482 shots from 24 different players as Aaron Rai eventually separated from the pack to win his first major championship, reports my SBJ colleague Josh Carpenter. CBS came on the air at 1pm, but the final four groups didn’t tee off at Aronimink Golf Club until after 2pm. The 482 shots shown marked a sizeable increase from 2025, when CBS aired 412 shots from 21 players as Scottie Scheffler captured his first Wanamaker Trophy.

Rai, who was 6-under-par for his final 10 holes en route to a three-shot win, had the day’s third-most shots shown with 49. Matti Schmid, who was in Sunday’s final pairing alongside Smalley, had the most shown with 61. Rory McIlroy, who was trying to go two-for-two in majors this year, had the second most with 58. Jon Rahm, who was tied for second with Smalley at 6-under, had 49 shots broadcast.

Meanwhile, commercial inventory is always a hot topic around golf’s majors, and CBS came in right around the same number on Sunday as last year’s final round. The network had 47 minutes of total commercials from 2pm-7pm, virtually the same as 46:55 for 2025’s final round.

Three types of sponsored segments fell under what SBJ was tracking while watching the tournament on Charlotte’s WBTV-CBS — full commercials that cut away entirely from live play; CBS’s “Eye on the Course” feature (which shows ads in a double-box with the competition); and “sponsored by” segments featuring quick voiceovers from play-by-play announcer Jim Nantz. All times tracked were approximated.

CBS was in full commercial for 32 minutes, 55 seconds, with the rest of the time spread out among “Eye on the Course” and “sponsored by” segments. It was only in a full commercial break for five minutes over the final hour of play, with 2:30 of that coming after Rai had holed out on 18 to secure his win.

I enjoyed having Tennis Channel CEO Jeff Blackburn on the most recent SBJ Sports Media Podcast. Blackburn brings a unique background after over 20 years at Amazon, including getting Prime Video off the ground and working to bring some of the sports deals to that platform.

He was candid on a few things related to the future of Tennis Channel. Here is what stood out:

On whether Tennis Channel, which Sinclair owns, could be moved/sold: “That’s not my focus at all, and it’s not Sinclair’s focus. They made a conscious decision to reinvest in an asset that was really working for them. That’s why they hired me. My job is to make good on that investment that they stepped up to do. ... I see more potential in that investment than I did when I started.”

On audience growth this spring: “When I came in here, we ... basically said, ‘Let’s make the nine ATP and WTA Masters 1000s our Super Bowls.’ And that was a year ago. And I think we’re seeing it pay off. Indian Wells, Miami, Monte Carlo, Madrid and it’s looking like Rome are all going to break records for Tennis Channel. ... All the tournaments we’ve had so far this year, we are up year-over-year significantly, and all the 1000s were up over 30%.”

On improving the Tennis Channel app’s streaming: “It’s slower than I wanted. ... We had zero software engineers at Tennis Channel [when I started]. Zero. Now we have seven. ... We are insanely productive on the software development side. There’s a lot to do though.”

Sticking around in sports media for 20 years is no small feat for a livestreaming service, especially one that isn’t attached to a legacy media company. But that’s where FloSports is, after two decades of ups and downs that has the company profitable and providing streaming for diehard fans across a number of sports.

FloSports turns 20 this month, and its staff of 400 now covers the gamut of high school, professional and college sports, including auto racing, hockey, wrestling, grappling, cycling, track and field, cheerleading, baseball, basketball, football, gymnastics, lacrosse, rugby, soccer, softball and volleyball.

“You have to have crazy beliefs to kind of stick to it, because in the early days, it was, ‘You have a 99.9999% chance of it failing,’ especially when you’re starting in track and field and wrestling,” said Mark Floreani, the company’s co-founder and CEO. “I mean, who does that with no background? No money? So you have to be a little crazy.”

Early FloSports moments that stand out to Floreani include the first live stream in 2007 at a Stanford track meet and the first time it showed the Penn Relays. “We filmed every single race, and every single race was uploaded … which blew away the running community,” he said. “It’s been 20 years trying to solve the problem of [growing] the long tail of a sport.”

Another watershed moment came in 2012 with its first subscription offering — a college wrestling match. “We saw people actually paying to watch — and a good amount of them,” Floreani noted. “We said, ‘Hey, we got something here.’”

Smaller moments also resonated for Floreani. “The first time an employee bought a car, and I was like, ‘Whoa, you did that off of our backs? That’s great,’” he recalled.

FloSports had public learning moments as well, such as when it went into business around local MLS games in 2019 with D.C. United and FC Cincinnati before having to end those deals.

“What we learned is what we all know now — that the local RSN model was inflated and a little broken,” Floreani said. “What we’re seeing today from a cable and even a direct-to-consumer perspective is that it becomes hard to make that work. What we’re good at is taking local and national events and creating a bigger worldwide audience. Our infrastructure and operating system work to expand the reach to make it worldwide — not to keep it local.”

What’s next for the company?

“I’m really excited about the next four to five years, because we have invested heavily in our infrastructure and operating system,” Floreani said. “We are in, let’s say, 20 sports, but really, we’re honing in on 10 today. And the next stage of growth, we think, there are 100 sports that our model works for and 100 million subscribers. So, we just believe we are just scratching the surface.”

• I went on Richard Deitsch’s podcast to talk about the NFL schedule release. We also gave a shoutout to longtime ESPN comms executive Mac Nwulu, who is leaving the company after 28 years.
• Scripps Sports scored local rights to its first NBA team, as the Pistons will air games over-the-air with the company beginning with the 2026-27 season.
• Fubo has withdrawn its offers to the NBA teams searching for new local broadcast homes, SBJ’s Tom Friend reported.
• The demise of Main Street Sports Group may have cast a cloud over RSNs, but as SBJ’s Joe Lemire reports, a set of guidelines can still help media companies not just survive, but thrive.
• While sports didn’t play a dominant role at the upfronts last week, it certainly is now a mainstay. My SBJ colleagues Josh Carpenter and Rob Schaefer joined me in giving takeaways from last week’s presentations to ad buyers, brands and TV affiliates.
• I spoke to execs from the NFL, NBC, Fox, ESPN, Prime Video and CBS about how they felt the 2026 NFL schedule shook out.
• How’s this for a wild sports broadcasting stat? When Al Michaels calls Prime Video’s first game of the season on Sept. 17 (Lions-Bills at Buffalo’s new Highmark Stadium), it will be the 10th time in his storied career that he is on the mic for the first game at a new NFL stadium, writes Deitsch.
• TNT Sports EVP and Chief Content Officer Craig Barry’s focus in Year 2 with Roland Garros is on incremental improvement, reports Schaefer.