NASCAR driver Denny Hamlin expressed concerns of his regarding the sport’s television rights agreements and its ongoing struggle to compete with NFL programming for Sunday viewership. Speaking on the Actions Detrimental with Denny Hamlin podcast, the amount of difficulties the sport continues to have is beginning to wear on Hamlin and other drivers.
“Just not good,” Hamlin said, candidly assessing the sport’s ratings situation. “We signed the deal that we signed. We obviously lost a significant amount of network races in this TV deal.”
Hamlin explained that recent broadcast agreements have prioritized financial gain over audience reach, a decision he believes has complicated access for fans. “In each one of the TV deals that we’ve signed over the last few years… we’ve always just taken the most amount of money,” he said. “It’s not been about what’s going to put us on in the most households.”
He also highlighted the challenges fans face in following NASCAR across multiple networks.
“We were the guinea pigs to get channel x off the ground, Channel Y off the ground,” Hamlin noted. “It’s just asking so much of your fans to keep chasing you around all these different networks.”
Hamlin understood the challenges with viewership however regarding the rising viewership figures of the NFL. He noted that the popularity of fantasy sports and legalization of sports gambling have played key factors in the massive viewership figures that play against NASCAR gaining any significant ground on the NFL in viewership.
“There’s only so many sports eyeballs. People that love sports love sports, and sometimes you’re just watching what’s on,” he said. “The NFL has taken such a lion’s share of those eyes right now, record-setting every single week… that’s their priority.”
He pointed out that the challenge extends beyond football. “Even every other weekend on a Sunday there’s another sport that has something big going on,” Hamlin said. “There’s always something else that’s got a big event going on that you’re having to battle against too.”
Reflecting on the new television deal with FOX, TNT Sports, Amazon, and NBC, Hamlin admitted he had long-standing reservations. “Eventually it all catches up, right?” he said. “When you’re tasked with getting channels off the ground, you’re going to lose some people. We just… took the best, highest dollar amount we could and pieced it all together and came up with the deal that we have. But long term, I’ve always had reservations about where we go with it.”
Hamlin emphasized the difficulty of gaining audience share in a landscape dominated by football. In 2025, the Cup Series is scraping by with an average of 2.52 million viewers per race, a 13% slide from 2024’s 2.916 million. Playoff races, which used to be the sport’s big draw, are hurting the worst. New Hampshire’s opener pulled just 1.29 million, down 32% from last year.
With his remarks, Hamlin underscored a key tension in modern NASCAR: balancing lucrative broadcast deals with the practical reality of reaching fans in a crowded sports marketplace.
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