Quote:
Originally Posted by broadrun96
Wow, you are absolutely incredibly so far out of touch with reality there it's insane. EVERY major outlet who could trashed the Chase the second it was announced, it lead DIRECTLY to decreased ticket sales the next season, attendance was up but at that point NASCAR was giving away almost 40 percent of the tickets at most tracks. Most everyone I knew in Virginia never once bought a ticket for Bristol or Martinsville, show up and you'd find a way in for free or maybe 10 bucks after 2007. And no, these were not all friends, it was people at a major college and people I knew of through other people including 25 guys who are involved in NASCAR and teams now. The Chase cost NASCAR its major fan base, and dropping Winston well that cost most every diehard watch every race, run a pool and follow it daily in the paper fan I knew in the hills. Those diehard fans I worked with stopped watching Bristol and Martinsville after the Chase, pretty much became a Daytona and we're done fans.
Pretending the Chase is a non influence shows you're way off the pulse. Or so pig headed you can't admit your stance may have been ill informed but I found with 15 min of searching over 200 articles in the archives of major racing publications talking about the Chase being the end of NASCAR written in period. Google is your friend and easy to use
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Okay, setting aside my suspicion regarding the idea that you directly verified that more than 200 different articles referencing the Chase were being expressly opposed to it rather than being a mix of opposition, hyperbole, and criticizing the notion that it WOULD kill the series(saw more than a few such articles back in the day), there's still a major issue with your assertion here...
News outlets are NOT the same as the fans as a whole - each article you look at expresses the viewpoint of a single person: The writer of the article. So unless every single one of those articles has thousands of people commenting in support of it that you can prove are all unique, they do not tell you ANYTHING.
This is why I generally exclude news publications from consideration when trying to gauge fan attitude. They're not reliable measurements - sure, they're sometimes in line with the actual attitude, but that doesn't mean the news outlets should be widely believed - and IMO one should be ESPECIALLY suspicious if a news report lines up with their own beliefs.
There's also the problem of the "loud minority" when it comes to these matters. The people who don't have widespread support tend to scream the loudest to make it seem like they do in order to get people to follow their ideas. And, as much as I hate to admit this, it works. FAR too often it works, and based on everything I've seen I am of the belief that you've fallen victim to this.
Now yes, it IS true I don't have my finger on the pulse of NASCAR fans the way I do with IndyCar and IMSA fans, but you don't have to have to be that tied in to be able to see the reality of the issue. The facts don't lie, and the fact of the matter is the NASCAR's popularity peaked AFTER the Chase was implemented, and the start of it's decline directly coincides with the financial crisis in 2008, which undoubtedly kicked it off, and subsequent actions by NASCAR only made things get worse than they would have become if they left well enough alone.
Could people have gotten tired of the Chase? It's certainly possible. But given the facts of the matter, it's far more likely that they got sick of the constant changes made to it. The first time I ever saw widespread criticism of the Chase that couldn't be written down to a loud minority was a couple years in when they changed it's eligibility criteria at the last minute to make sure Dale Earnhardt, Jr would get in. Only Junior fans were supportive of THAT move.
I think I should finish this off by making clear that I do NOT think NASCAR absolutely MUST retain the Chase. I merely feel that if they do it should be reverted to it's original form, and that there are far, FAR more important matters to address first - chief among which being fixing the cars.
Case in point - do you know what ELSE coincided with the beginning of the decline? The realization that NASCAR was not going to simply give up on the Car of Tomorrow. Only the most blindly loyal of NASCAR fans liked that monstrosity.