For odd reasons, I became a NASCAR fan almost 20 years ago. Oddly, that makes me an 'old school' fan even. As such, I can comment that NASCAR's leadership has utterly destroyed their sport by fiddling with it. The NHL has also fiddled, but nowhere near as badly.
Here is something that even a non-race-fan could read and scratch their heads over: a race is now STOPPED 1/3 and 2/3 of the way through to create little mini-races within the race called 'stages'. There are bonus points for that. Oh, also they tried to increase interest at the end of the season (November, not NASCAR weather) by creating the "Chase", which were effectively playoffs. Only the top 10 racers for the last 10 races would have a chance to with the season championship. Then they fiddled with that, adding wild cards, then making it twelve Oh and they changed the points system they had for 50 years. And they changed the car.
You can now see empty stands, and some tracks have removed stands so it doesn't look so bad on TV.
https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2017/nov/17/more-than-a-kneeling-nascars-tv-ratings-decline-is-as-worrying-as-the-nfls-whyThe article makes a good case for cutting off the oversupply of content in these sports:
that means cutting tens of hours of race broadcasts down to the best three hours. It means starving people, and then feed them. It means throw the fat online, and see how much they’ll pay for it. In fact, Nascar could just dump it all on Netflix – which, according to one study, is responsible for half the decline of TV viewership alone.
Of course, Netflix doesn't have live streaming (in Canada at least) and I suspect the older viewers have no idea what Netflix is. There will be pain in NFL and NASCAR offices before things get better...