An iconic NASCAR team is shutting down and offering a rare peek inside the sport’s financial system. … The WNBA keeps setting TV records, even without Caitlin Clark. … Another NBA coach is getting paid big-time. … And Front Office Sports Today looks at Indiana’s busy sports scene.
—David Rumsey and Eric Fisher
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Mark J. Rebilas-USA TODAY Sports
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The dissolution of one of NASCAR’s biggest teams is set to provide the biggest look yet into its complicated charter system, which is the sport’s version of franchises.
Stewart-Haas Racing is one of only three Cup Series teams that employ four full-time drivers. But this week, the organization announced it would close operations after the 2024 season. “The commitment needed to extract maximum performance while providing sustainability is incredibly demanding, and we’ve reached a point in our respective personal and business lives where it’s time to pass the torch,” SHR co-owners Tony Stewart (above) and Gene Haas said in a joint statement.
Now, not even 48 hours since SHR’s announcement, the sale of its charters, which represent four of the 36 available, appears to already be underway. Charter spots guarantee entry into, and prize money from, all NASCAR Cup Series events. On Wednesday, Front Row Motorsports announced it had acquired another charter, in addition to its existing two. Although no price or seller was disclosed, multiple reports linked the deal to SHR.
Beyond existing teams, SHR could also sell its charters to new investors looking to enter NASCAR. And the deals could come at a steep price: Previously, the most recent single charter sale went for $40 million when Spire Motorsports bought one from Live Fast Motorsports last fall, according to The Athletic, and the top of the market is projected to be north of $50 million.
That means SHR could fetch more than $200 million if it sold its charter at premium rates. And that’d be quite the return, given that NASCAR teams paid nothing for the charters when they were created in 2016.
End of an Era
Stewart-Haas Racing was officially launched in 2009 when Stewart, then a two-time NASCAR Cup Series champion, became a driver-owner for a team owned by Haas that had been operating as an offshoot of Hendrick Motorsports. Stewart won the ’11 title driving for SHR, which earned one other Cup Series championship in ’14 with Kevin Harvick.
Harvick retired after the 2023 season, in which he was the best driver at SHR, finishing 13th in the Cup Series standings. This season, no SHR driver is currently in the top 15: Chase Briscoe sits at 16th, followed by Josh Berry (19th), Noah Gragson (21st), and Ryan Preece (28th). While SHR’s charters will live on at new teams no matter what, its drivers are not guaranteed to find new homes next season.
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Grace Hollars-USA TODAY Sports
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Imagine a sports league is drawing up a game plan to set a bevy of new viewership marks across nearly all its broadcast partners. It’s highly unlikely they would plan to rely on a rookie leading a team with a lone victory and the second-worst record in that league one-fifth of the way through the season.
But that’s reality for the WNBA, which simply can’t stop drawing record TV audiences this month. It began with Caitlin Clark’s debut, which was the league’s most-viewed game in 23 years, and hasn’t slowed down since. Over Memorial Day weekend, three more networks drew their biggest WNBA audiences ever, and it wasn’t even all due to Clark, according to Sports Media Watch.
Spreading the Ball Around
So far, six different TV networks have broadcast the most-watched WNBA games ever on their channels, respectively:
- ESPN2: Fever at Sun, May 14, 2.1 million
- ABC: Fever at Liberty, May 18, 1.71 million
- ESPN: Sun at Fever, May 20, 1.56 million
- Ion: Fever at Sparks, May 24, 724,000
- CBS: Liberty at Lynx, May 25, 704,000
- NBA TV: Fever at Aces, May 25, 333,000
ABC also averaged 1.34 million viewers for Sparks at Aces on May 16, the network’s third-highest WNBA audience of all time. Indiana and Clark have also played one game on Amazon Prime Video, which doesn’t release viewership figures, and one game not on national TV. CBS gets its first crack at a Fever game June 16, and ESPN has multiple games featuring Clark in July, when there will be no NBA or NHL to compete with.
Even More Ahead?
Despite the phenomenon that is Caitlin Clark and the overall increased interest in the league, more work remains to be done in order to set all-time WNBA viewership records. No game this season has cracked the league’s top 10 broadcasts, which feature audiences between 2.46 million and 5.04 million on NBC in the WNBA’s inaugural season and early years.
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Indiana hosted the 2024 NBA All-Star Game and is a regular stop for the Final Four, Big Ten Football Championship Game, Big Ten basketball games, and other major sporting events. This summer, the state will host Olympic swimming trials in a football stadium. Indiana Sports Corp president Patrick Talty joins the show to discuss how the state has actively sought to bring in big events and how they evaluate whether one is worth the time and money to host.
🎧 Watch, listen, and subscribe on Apple, Google, Spotify, and YouTube.
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$14 million
Total annual salary of Clippers head coach Ty Lue, who just signed a five-year extension with the team, according to multiple reports. That puts Lue, 47, among the highest-earning coaches in the NBA and continues a run of big coaching contracts. Warriors coach Steve Kerr is said to be making $17.5 million annually, with Spurs coach Gregg Popovich close behind at $16 million. Heat coach Erik Spoelstra comes in at $15 million per year, and Pistons coach Monty Williams at $14 million, like
Lue.
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On this day 113 years ago: The first Indianapolis 500 was staged, though it did not start with that name. Initially run as the 1911 International 500-Mile Sweepstakes Race, the event was designed to help consolidate several smaller auto races into a single competition capable of capturing the attention of competitors and manufacturers from both Europe and the U.S.
The core tenets of the race—200 laps around a 2.5-mile track at Indianapolis Motor Speedway—remain to this day. But virtually every other element has changed dramatically. An average speed of 74.6 miles per hour for initial race winner Ray Harroun is now a fraction of the 167.8 miles per hour for this year’s champion, Josef Newgarden. Harroun earned a $10,000 purse for that initial win, coming out of retirement to compete in the race and immediately returning to it. Newgarden, by comparison, received $4.29 million. A total purse of $27,500 for the 1911 race—at the time the largest sum offered in auto racing—was just 1.5% of this year’s record purse of $18.45 million. And an attendance of about 90,000 for the inaugural event was less than one-third of what the race now regularly draws.
But stretching through the popularization of radio, the introduction of television and the internet, and the development of new race car technology—all of which have also transformed how the race is run and shown to fans—the Indy 500 remains a Memorial Day weekend fixture and an iconic part of U.S. sports culture.
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 | The IBA, unrecognized by the IOC, vowed $50,000 to boxing gold medalists. |
 | Dov Kleiman was seeking $75,000 for his account in December. |
 | The state senator announced she won’t introduce legislation required to advance the project. |
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