Ryan: NASCAR, Texas Motor Speedway embrace Final Four
Texas Motor Speedway president Eddie Gossage could have waved off the shot, but he wanted the basketball — even if it threatened to slam dunk his track into weekend obscurity.
The 2014 NCAA Final Four lands in the heart of the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex, coinciding with the same annual spring weekend that NASCAR's premier series visits the same market.
Gossage was given the option of swapping dates and moving to mid-March or Mother's Day.
He made a switch — moving his race from Saturday night to Sunday to avoid a direct conflict with Saturday's semifinal games.
"I normally subscribe to the theory that a problem is a problem," Gossage told USA TODAY Sports this week. "But we're trying to turn this into an opportunity."
It's another sign of an emerging trend in NASCAR, which has shown more of a willingness to embrace other national sports and their success after long trying to differentiate itself from them.
It's a tacit acknowledgement that stock-car racing is no longer the white-hot upstart of the mid-1990s, but one of many sports entities competing for the increasingly fragmented and short attention spans of America's fans.
The NCAA games at AT&T Stadium — home of the NFL's Dallas Cowboys — could draw record crowds of more than 80,000, but that still will be fewer than the more than 100,000 who will attend Sunday's Duck Commander 500 at Texas Motor Speedway.
Yet a much larger TV audience unquestionably will be watching the semifinals and championship game that the race will be sandwiched between.
And even on the weekends when the Texas track isn't faced with such stiff competition, there are reminders that work remains to raise its profile.
"(Track owner) Bruton (Smith) once told me, 'I bet if you took a clipboard on race week, and went to downtown Dallas, you would find out that two out of 10 people would know you have a race this week,'" Gossage said. "I bet six out of 10 wouldn't know the speedway exists. I think he's probably right. That problem is an opportunity because of the huge crowds we've drawn here.
"We've been tremendously successful. If there's still 60-80% in downtown Dallas — the business people, the Yuppies, the Millennials — that don't know we're here, that means we've been doing pretty good and now we just have to figure out how to get to those people."
Piggybacking off the exposure of the NCAA tournament is part of this year's strategy for the Texas track, which has taken steps to celebrate the basketball extravaganza and woo its fans rather than compete with it.
Since Selection Sunday, Gossage's staff has marketed heavily to college hoops fans through various schools' alumni and fan websites. The Harlem Globetrotters will perform on hardwood floors laid in the track's garage at an annual prerace party for season ticketholders.
Gossage said it's too early to judge the impact on ticket sales, but several sponsors have increased their hospitality spending for Sunday's race, bringing in more clients and customers to the race who already were in town. Panasonic will host dozens of athletic directors at the game, and Liberty Mutual will rent the track Monday before the game.
Just making the effort to reach those unfamiliar with racing dovetails with other NASCAR initiatives to take the product mainstream.
Look no further than the Chase for the Sprint Cup, which has been reformatted this season into a 16-driver bracket that looks eerily similar to those that many filled out in office pools for the famous tournament that will conclude in Arlington, Texas, the day after Texas hosts its race.
In addition to four branded rounds, the Chase will include eliminations for the first time — confirmation that while NASCAR doesn't have a traditional "postseason," it wants its championship to mimic other sports.
"When the Chase was first announced, NASCAR would bristle if you referred to it as 'playoff,' " Gossage said. "Now even a layman understands that Chase is NASCAR's playoff, and there's nothing wrong with that at all.
"Sometimes it's good to be measured by other sports. If they're doing something that's successful, there's nothing wrong with emulating it."
There are other signs of that at Texas. This weekend will mark the debut of "Big Hoss," a 218-foot wide and 94-foot tall high-definition video board that the Guinness Book of World Records is set to certify as the world's largest Sunday.
By the end of the 2015 season, Gossage tells USA TODAY Sports that his 1,500-acre property will be outfitted with WiFi technology — an expensive and gargantuan task given Texas Motor Speedway's massive footprint.
Both moves, though, are being driven by a simple factor — competition. Many other professional sports stadiums have ample WiFi networks and hi-def video boards. If NASCAR wants to attract the 21st century wave of fans who engage on social media during events and have matured in widescreen era, it needs the same.
"These are difficult to construct and so expensive," Gossage said. "But you've got to have it if we continue making this a place fans want to be."
AT&T Stadium admittedly will be that place for some of this weekend.
But give Gossage credit for recognizing it and still taking a shot.
Follow Ryan on Twitter @nateryan
