Fans of Dale Earnhardt, Jr. have to be disappointed with how the 2009 season has started.  After five races, the point standings show that he’s mired back in 19th position.  He’s only posted one top-ten and, worse yet, has led only a single lap.  A handful of driving mistakes at Daytona and a blown engine at Fontana, CA have set the tone for the early part of the season.

One could imagine the pressure that Earnhardt, Jr. must be experiencing.  His move in 2008 to Hendrick Motorsports was supposed to be the key that opened the door to winning championships and lifting his career to heights worthy of the Earnhardt name.  Many thought the move was a good one; even Darrell Waltrip was predicting a handful of wins in his first year with Hendrick.  And the 2008 season started off well — a victory in the Bud Shootout all-star event followed by another win in the Gatorade 150 Daytona qualifying race.  But things quickly turned flat for the team and they eventually fell out of contention for the championship, posting only a single race win on a fuel-mileage run at Michigan.

In 2007, Dale Earnhardt, Jr. suprised the NASCAR world by announcing that he would leave the team his father created and race for Rick Hendrick in 2008.

At 34 years old, Dale Jr. knows that if he wants to be one of NASCAR’s all-time greats like his father, the time to win championships is now.  With 18 career Cup wins, Dale Jr. is no slouch behind the wheel, of course.  But at the same time it’s easy to expect that he’ll be judged against his father’s success.  Much of what he enjoys now — the merchandise sales, NASCAR’s Most Popular Driver year after year, etc. — is best attributed to the Earnhardt name.

In fairness, from the very beginning Dale Jr. has insisted that he is his own person with his own driving style.  I think it’s important for us fans to respect that.  Some critics might argue that he doesn’t have the drive and determination that his father did.  But in some ways that’s unfair: his father raced at a time when he had to make his own name and his own financial success on the racetrack.  Fame and fortune can be an incredible motivator and, let’s face it, Dale Jr. has those things already.

It’s hard to see what changes Dale Jr. would have to make to win a championship.  Clearly Hendrick Motorsports is a top NASCAR enterprise, but it’s not so clear that Dale Jr. has the best equipment on the circuit.  He insists on keeping crew chief Tony Eury, Jr. on board, but a different crew chief might go a long way.  Would Jimmie Johnson be so successful without Chad Knauss?  How about Jeff Gordon’s early years without Ray Evernham?

And what about Kyle Busch?  When driving this very same car for Hendrick he had only modest success.  Now that he’s in the Gibbs organization he’s winning everything in sight.

So was the move to Hendrick Motorsports a good one for Dale Jr.?  Time will tell.  He started his career at Dale Earnhardt, Inc. and posted two wins in his rookie season in 2000.  His most successful year was 2004, when he won six times, including the Daytona 500.  He was right there amongst the point leaders, but his run for the championship ended against the backstretch wall at Atlanta.  Then things went downhill.  One win each in 2005 and 2006, and no wins in 2007, when he finally pulled the trigger and announced he would leave DEI for Hendrick Motorsports.

I like Dale Jr.  He drives cleaner than his father but still has some of that throwback to old-school racing.  He’s not as polished as many of the newer drivers and isn’t a crybaby whiner like some of the others.  I think if the right opportunity comes along and he gets solid equipment he should be able to snag one or two of those Cup trophies after all.

As for 2009, the next several races could present the best opportunity to turn the season around as the team goes to tracks where Dale Jr. does well at.  He has one career Cup win at Texas, two at Phoenix, five at Talladega and three at Richmond.

Well here’s one you can’t blame on the bad economy: overnight ratings for Sunday’s Bristol race are down 18% from last year. Not too surprising, as the trend for the year has averaged down 11% already. And ratings have been petering out the past few seasons.

There are some obvious reasons for the decline, the clearest one being “the product” itself. NASCAR racing has become incredibly dull. And I’m not so much referring just to what’s happening (or not happening) on the track — there have always been boring races, and every sport has boring games. The problem as I see it is that there is no “off-track drama” to sustain people’s interests. That is, the sport itself isn’t exciting. The drivers are boring. There are no controversies or rivalries. The cars are embarrassingly ugly. The tracks are mostly the same configuration and the ones that are different are paved like sidewalks. Hell, I don’t even admit liking NASCAR to my friends anymore — I tell them I watch cricket.

But let’s look past those obvious things and admit that NASCAR has another problem: the television coverage is absolutely terrible. And it seems to be across all networks. Between screaming rodents, quacking ducks and “boogity! boogity! boogity!”, they have helped take NASCAR from a man’s sport to a silly 3-hour joke more fitting of an afternoon at Sesame Place. Seemingly gone are the days of gritty drivers piloting bad-ass cars on a razor’s edge and even breaking a sweat while doing it. If us fans are looking to watch cartoons and comedy, there are plenty of better options on the television dial that we can choose from.

It is really at the point now where I find it painful — yes, painful — to watch a NASCAR race on television. Certainly it is true that they have many more cameras than in the old days, and a lot more of the action is caught because of that, but the overall experience portrays “the product” as a kiddie sport no more dangerous than whiffle ball.

Unless NASCAR wants to “realign” itself right into irrelevance, it needs to pick up the phone here and address the state of its television coverage. It negotiated these big TV packages to begin with, I’m sure they could make changes happen… if they wanted to.

Sometimes I ask myself if all the disdain for Kyle Busch is really justified. Then he’ll go out and do something so childish and embarrassing that my doubts are kept in check. Saturday was one of those days when he reminds the racing world that he is the most classless driver on the circuit.

After dominating the Nationwide race at Bristol, one of his crew members made a mistake on the final pitstop by allowing the right-rear tire to roll outside of his pit box. Busch picked up the standard NASCAR penalty of restarting at the end of the lead lap line, which in this case was 14th position. He ended up finishing sixth.

Okay, we get it: the guy made a mistake and it probably cost them the race. Everyone has a right to be passionate about it. But where Kyle loses points is in his childish antics. After learning about the penalty he ripped his team through the in-car radio. Then, after the race was over, he didn’t even bother driving the car back to the garage area. He parked it on the track, threw off his helmet to show his anger and left the facility — clearly an insult to his team.

The reality is that NASCAR is a team sport. You win as a team, and you lose as a team. It’s always been that way, and always will be that way. Kyle Busch is not a team player; probably because he feels that his talent is above his crew’s abilities. Some day he is going to make a mistake when driving the race car. What would he think if his crew threw up their hands, told him he sucks, and then refused to service his car for the rest of the day?

Here is where the problem lies: the racing media has launched this guy into God’s gift to the racing world and have fed his relentlessly immature self-aggrandizing by endlessly talking up his perceived greatness. Then all the Busch apologists come out to defend him on TV when he acts like a spoiled brat. Even this evening Jimmy Spencer and Kenny Wallace used their platform on SPEED TV to speak of Busch’s “righteous anger” when dealing with his crew. Wallace offered that Busch’s greatness makes him “the Dale Earnhardt of now”. (With all due respect, I do not believe that Kyle could carry Earnhardt’s jock strap.)

Busch will probably go on to have a lot of victories, but if he doesn’t grow up quick, he’ll never be one of NASCAR’s greatest drivers. NASCAR’s greatest drivers were also some of the best people. Ned Jarrett, Neil Bonnett, Bobby Allison, Richard Petty — all drivers with talent, passion, and success in their own right — but also good gentlemen that have represented the sport well.

Here is one fact I know about automobile racing: there is no other sport in America that can humble a man in the wink of an eye like this sport can. One moment you can be the hottest driver on the circuit, and the next moment you’re laid up in a hospital. If Busch is building his personality on victories and brash ego alone, he is opening himself up to the possibility of a huge downfall.

Who knows… maybe that Formula One ride will come through after all. That’ll be just one less punk NASCAR fans will have to deal with.