With NFL schedule expansion seemingly imminent, NASCAR is already working towards tweaking its schedule to avoid a direct conflict with the Playoffs or the Super Bowl.
Specifically, the Daytona 500 is generally held the week after the Super Bowl but the latter might gets pushed back to President’s Day weekend if current projections hold true.
NASCAR senior vice president of racing development and strategy, Ben Kennedy, told a group of reporters (as detailed by RACER) on Saturday morning at Daytona that the Sanctioning Body is working to avoid schedule conflicts.
“We’re keeping tabs on it, for sure,” Kennedy said. “(And) having a lot of conversations with our partners, have a couple of conversations with the NFL as well. We’re going to be talking about next year’s date this weekend and (there are) not really any big changes, which I think is going to be helpful. But long term, it is something that we’re mindful of because we don’t want to go up against the Super Bowl.”
NASCAR has recently held its preseason exhibition Clash on the off weekend between the NFL conference championships and the Super Bowl.
“We’ve talked about: do you go the weekend before? Do we keep it the weekend after?” Kennedy said. “I think we lean toward the latter of trying to come out of the Super Bowl and go to the Daytona 500. So, we’ll stay close to them because it has an impact on this date. But then, as you think of the season in totality, you talk about off weeks when we end FOX and start Amazon and the other broadcast partners. We have to be mindful of that as well.”
This is the first year of a seven-year extension between NASCAR and FOX, a partnership that has continually operated since the 2001 season. FOX is part of a network rotation that hosts the Super Bowl each season.
