Why Colts schedule is bad news for the Brickyard

INDIANAPOLIS – NFL schedule-makers did NASCAR and Indianapolis Motor Speedway no favors Thursday night. Despite requests made by both parties to keep the Colts out of Indianapolis on Week 1 of the regular season – the same date as the Brickyard 400 -- that’s exactly where’ll they be.

On Sunday, Sept. 9, the Colts are slated to open the 2018 season against the Cincinnati Bengals at 1 p.m. – just one hour before the green flag flies on the Big Machine Vodka 400 at the Brickyard Powered by Florida Georgia Line.

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This is undoubtedly another blow for an event that has seen attendance plummet in recent years. In fact, those dwindling crowds were one of the major reasons Speedway boss Doug Boles asked NASCAR to move the Brickyard -- which will be run for the 25th time -- from its usual slot in July to the final regular-season race on the NASCAR calendar at the beginning of September.

Boles said the primary motivation behind the move was to address what he said was fans' No. 1 complaint about the Brickyard: that scorching July sun.

While Indianapolis temperatures should be more hospitable in September than in July, the Brickyard could now be facing an even tougher opponent than the heat: the Colts. The Colts will almost undoubtedly attract a sellout crowd to Lucas Oil Stadium for their opener, and that could draw fans away from a race that has not been very popular in Indianapolis lately.

Boles, however, isn't so sure the same fans who attend the Brickyard are the same who populate Colts games. He anticipates the biggest hit will come with a lack of local media attention. Much of the focus will be on the opener and the potential return of Andrew Luck rather than the Brickyard.

"In a perfect world, we'd rather not be head-to-head at home," Boles told IndyStar Thursday night. "But we knew we'd be head-to-head regardless, whether they were here or on the road. ... We just had our fingers crossed that it wouldn't be the first year of the new date for the race."

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Despite Boles' and IMS' exceptional efforts the past few years to reinvigorate the weekend by amping up their efforts for the hauler parade, packing more entertainment into a tighter schedule and engaging the city in new ways, the crowds have not come. After once routinely attracting crowds upwards of 200,000, only an estimated 35,000 showed up for the Brickyard last year.

Among the race's biggest problems is that it hasn't been very entertaining.

"Lately," NASCAR legend Jeff Gordon said ahead of last year's Brickyard, "the racing itself has not been spectacular."

While last year's race started off slow, it certainly packed more action and was more memorable that previous iterations, largely because it included 11 crashes and lasted six hours. Will the madness from the end of last year's race be enough to attract more fans and prevent the scheduling conflict from having a major impact this year? We'll soon find out.

"Part of me says it's not any different really than we thought," Boles said. "We knew at some point this was going to happen. And I'd say all the advantages that we think come with moving to September outweigh the fact that we're going head-to-head with them here in the market."

"The other good thing is that we've been talking to the Colts about it since last year. In fact, the last real conversation we've had about it with the Colts was if they did end up being at home, we'd work together to make sure, at minimum, we weren't competing against each other. We'll communicate with them as we go forward and both figure out how to promote and support each other."

Follow IndyStar Motor Sports Insider Jim Ayello on Twitter and Facebook: @jimayello.