NASCAR’s Busch Clash challenges Pro Bowl in TV ratings, but NFL is still king

In a sports era when the NFL is king, a NASCAR event came close to taking the league’s throne this past weekend.

The 2022 Busch Light Clash at the Coliseum, a two-day event that ended with a 150-lap main event at Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum on Sunday, had comparable TV ratings to the 2022 Pro Bowl, per reports released Tuesday.

The Clash tallied 4.28 million viewers on Fox, according to Fox Sports. That’s the largest audience to watch the event since 2016.

The Pro Bowl, conversely, notched 6.69 million viewers across ABC, ESPN and DisneyXD — the smallest audience for the game in 16 years, per Sports Media Watch.

It’s no secret that the NFL has had its grip over the sports-watching world the last decade. Regular season NFL games tend to outshine anything else on television the same night. (This year, Game 5 of an exciting World Series matchup earned 13.64 million viewers, per Sports Media Watch. A Week 8 Cowboys vs. Vikings game played the same night earned 15.68 million viewers.)

But Sunday was a bit different.

The Busch Clash has captured a solid audience before. The event notched 2.46 million viewers in 2020 and 1.76 million viewers in 2021, when exhibition race was on FS1. Sunday’s TV ratings, a boost from years past, could be another example of NASCAR’s ascension.

Joey Logano won Sunday’s final race and called this year’s Clash “an amazing event.”. He added, “Congratulations, NASCAR. Such a huge step in our industry to be able to do this, put on an amazing race for everybody.”

Of course, these numbers might also be explained by the fact that the 2022 Pro Bowl was notably ... well, not an NFL-caliber product. The Washington Post called the game a “pleasingly sloppy” one — a generous take considering the game featured little tackling and seven interceptions (at least one thrown by each of the game’s six quarterbacks).

The 2020 Pro Bowl was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Before that, the event captured 7.97 million viewers in 2019 and 8.6 million viewers in 2018.

Brian Burns and Stephon Gilmore represented the Carolina Panthers in the exhibition contest. Burns notched two sacks and two tackles for loss.

This story was originally published February 8, 2022 at 4:33 PM.

Alex Zietlow

The Herald

Alex Zietlow writes about sports and the ways in which they intersect with life in York, Chester and Lancaster counties for The Herald, where he has been an editor and reporter since August 2019. Zietlow has won nine S.C. Press Association awards in his career, including First Place finishes in Feature Writing, Sports Enterprise Writing and Education Beat Reporting. He also received two Top-10 awards in the 2021 APSE writing contest and was nominated for the 2022 U.S. Basketball Writers Association’s Rising Star award for his coverage of the Winthrop men’s basketball team.