Happy Hour: Cruising into the off weekend
Throughout the week you can send us your best questions, jokes, rants and just plain miscellaneous thoughts to [email protected] or @NickBromberg. We’ll post them here and have a good time.
Hey, it’s an off weekend!
We’re looking forward to it. It’s nice to have a summer weekend not in July without a Sprint Cup Series race and if you’re jonesing for racing, there’s the Trucks on Friday night, the Xfinity Series on Saturday night and Formula 1 Sunday morning. We have confidence you race-addled people will survive. Hopefully you get to spend some time with your fathers on Sunday if you have the opportunity.
And hey, we give Dale Earnhardt Jr. credit for proposing in a week leading into an off-weekend. That’s about as media friendly as you can get, people. Content for days!
Because it is an off weekend, y’all were a little quiet this week. Make sure to follow us on Twitter so you can submit your stupid questions to us. Sometimes y’all are too smart in this column.
Away we go…
@NickBromberg DO YOU AGREE WITH CALLING THE MICHIGAN RACE AFTER 138 LAPS? I DO. I WAS THERE. IT WAS A TORRENTIAL RAIN.
— ANNOYING RACE FAN (@annoyingracefan) June 18, 2015
They should have run the race at 11 p.m. after it stopped raining (Had it stopped raining by then?) Just have all the cars park on the backstretch and turn their headlights on. Or, make the teams install real headlights instead of decals on the Cup cars. It could have been the 24 Hours of Michigan.
Nah, NASCAR made the right call. That was just a cluster of a race because of the weather. And sometimes that happens. But man, did Fox telegraph the race being called after it was stopped for a fourth time. After being incredibly optimistic about rain coverage, suddenly the entire broadcast became pessimistic about the race’s continuation. Never, ever, do you hear an analyst say the race will likely be banged. But there was Michael Waltrip on Sunday doing just that.
@NickBromberg The heck with rain, rules, and rings, rank your TV screw ups of last weekend (add the NXS clock snafu) pic.twitter.com/vJAcWhEids
— Brian Cullather (@Briancullather) June 18, 2015
Speaking of rain coverage…
To show the difference in Fox’s attitude and coverage, we take you back to the first caution of the day, which is the first picture Brian tweets. When Fox came back from commercial, Mike Joy didn’t immediately mention the race was red-flagged. And after NASCAR itself even tweeted the race had been halted for rain, Fox was tweeting that cars were still rolling. The misdirection is inexplicable. It takes more effort to be indirect when it comes to rain than it is to simply say “It’s raining. The race is red-flagged.”
We’re not going to call that a screw up, however. The other two pictures, boy. Graphics had a tough weekend. During the ARCA race the yellow dot on the map was, conceivably, in Brooklyn, New York. Michigan International Speedway is in Brooklyn, Michigan.
The other was even worse. There’s a ton of things wrong with that graphic from the Truck Series. Gateway is 1.25 miles, the sentence on No. 2 wasn’t even complete and the race was actually 160 laps and not 200.
Look, we get that mistakes happen. We accidentally typed a “0” in a post yesterday and you’d have thought we committed a mortal sin based on our inbox. But it’s a recurring theme for the network, which has NASCAR rights for many more years. More on this after Sonoma, but we can safely say we’re excited for NBC’s debut.
@NickBromberg ok who wins the US Open? I’ll hang up and listen.. I am going with Speith.
— Racer_24 (@Racer24) June 18, 2015
This column has a Fox theme.
The network has the rights for the U.S. Open for the first time and it’s a bit jarring to see Fox graphics on a golf telecast. Going to take some getting used to. We haven’t seen Digger yet, which is good. Glad he’s actually been retired and not just reassigned to a different sport.
Chambers Bay is a fascinating course. It doesn’t look like Augusta National at all and it’s even a bit like Martinsville with the train tracks right next to it. We have the benefit of writing this after some of the first round was completed, so we’ll take Dustin Johnson. He’s going to win a major at some point.
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Nick Bromberg is the editor of From The Marbles on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter!
