It’s time for Bill Weber to stop bringing up the Hendrick plane crash when Johnson is about to do something special

I know for a fact that NASCAR fans sometimes see exactly what they want to see, especially when it comes to television coverage.
Over the years I’ve received dozens of e-mails from folks who watch and/or listen to the same broadcasts I do but who see and/or hear something completely different. They’re convinced, for instance, that one network favors a particular driver or group of drivers over another.
Drivers complain, too.
Remember Kyle Busch after he won at New Hampshire, getting in a shot at TNT because he hadn’t been interviewed after the previous couple of races?
Sunday at Indianapolis, I had my radar up about how NBC was going to marry its return to the NFL fold with the first NASCAR race it had broadcast in what will be the final season of its deal for racing.
I used to write about sports on TV and radio on a regular basis before taking this job in 1997, so I’m a little predisposed to pay attention to such matters anyway.
I think I am smart enough to know that a certain amount of cross-promotion is not only inevitable, but perfectly legitimate. One of the great things for NASCAR about being on Fox and NBC since 2001, in fact, is that NASCAR coverage gets promoted in entertainment shows and other sports coverage on those networks.
It struck me, though, that NBC went to a promo/preview of the Hall of Fame Game from Canton, Ohio, right after Jimmie Johnson’s victory lane interview following the Allstate 400. And I wrote a comment about it that appeared in the Charlotte Observer and on thatsracin.com.
On thatsracin.com, a headline said that NBC showed no replays of the last lap incidents during Sunday’s race. That’s not right, and it was my fault for implying that in what I wrote so that the person writing the headline drew that conclusion.
I was still in the Indianapolis airport Monday afternoon when my cell phone rang. It was Dick Ebersol, the man behind the success of NBC Sports for so long, calling to talk about what I’d written.
Now I can be a pretty stubborn son of a gun when I am arguing with somebody who I am convinced doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But it has been my experience with people like Ebersol and his counterpart at Fox, David Hill that I can count on them knowing what they’re saying when it comes to something that’s aired on their network.
Ebersol had been in Ohio for Sunday night’s preseason game between Oakland and Philadelphia and he wanted to give me his side of the story.
He’d been in the truck at Canton when the NASCAR race ended, he said, and decided immediately to extend the postrace coverage from the planned 15 minutes to 20 minutes.
"They had a lot of stuff to cover,” Ebersol said.
He read off a list of people who were interviewed before Johnson made it to victory lane, and then ticked off those who made it on camera after the football promo. He said analysts Benny Parsons and Wally Dallenbach spent three minutes reviewing replays of the last-lap incidents. And he told me that in 21 minutes of postrace coverage, there was only one 30-second commercial (a Chevrolet spot congratulating Johnson).
In what I wrote after the race, I suggested NBC would use NASCAR coverage later this year to hype its return to the NFL. Ebersol told me that he and NASCAR have talked about how much cross-promotion there will be and vowed that it will be a two-way street – that NASCAR will continue to get promoted on NBC’s other programming just as it has through the first five years of the six-year deal that ends this year.
Ebersol was direct, but as he has been every time I’ve spoken to him in this job or my former role as a sports TV/radio columnist, he could not have been nicer. He disagreed with what I wrote, and he wanted to tell me why he thought I was wrong, but he did it the way I wish I could do it when I feel that way about something.
I still don’t think NBC had a great day at the races on Sunday. I like Bill Weber, both as a person and a broadcaster, but it’s time for him to stop bringing up the 2004 crash of a Hendrick Motorsports team plane when Johnson is about to do something special.
I like Wally Dallenbach and Benny Parsons a great deal, too, and I know there were replays of the last-lap crashes. But when the broadcast went off I still didn’t have a good idea of what had happened and why, so I reckon the fans at home didn’t, either.
But just about every time I go back and read one of my stories about a race, I think of three or four things I should have done a better job of explaining or describing. And people aren’t reading that story as I am writing it, either. Television doesn’t have a backspace key, and sometimes it’s too easy to forget that.
I know race fans pretty well, I think, and I know that this fall if NBC runs NFL scores across the screen during races some of those fans will scream bloody murder. But I also know what NBC is paying for NFL rights, too, and I know I’d probably make some of the same decisions that Ebersol and his people will make if I were in their shoes.
At least, I hope I’d be smart enough to.