In the 90's NASCAR experienced a big boom in popularity and visibility.
They responded with massive national expansion, taking their product to new and big markets with huge untapped potential viewer bases. For awhile, it jumped to never before seen heights of mainstream popularity.
But, as the years went by, the casual viewership that expansion had attracted started to flag a bit. They tweaked the cars, tweaked the rules, messed with the schedule, expanded more and more and more, but that slippage just kept going.
All along, a rump of cranky old fans stuffed into the dustbin of history had been saying: these gleaming cookie-cutter oval tracks all over the country aren't NASCAR, they're selling out, they're spoiling this. Easy message to ignore, you have those fans anyway, take a seat old man, growth is the future.
Turns out? The legacy and aesthetic and history, the vibe if you like, of that old Dixie NASCAR that was tossed aside for glittering megabucks modernity was what the appeal of the sport was to outsiders in the first place. They'd been tuning in for the vibes. Bringing the product to their doorstep wasn't serving these customers when it was an anonymized soulless shadow of itself.
NASCAR still lives. Anyone who works in the Loop knows all too well that it does, lol. The sport is anything but dead, anything but bankrupt, anything but invisible. It's all still there. But it has unmistakably shrunken since those 90's salad days. The expansion has rolled back for lack of interest. And they're starting to realize where they went wrong. North Wilkesboro Speedway, a grimy old relic in the middle of nowhere North Carolina which had literally been left to seed by the sport in the heart of its glittering expansion has been reclaimed and reopened and it just hosted NASCAR's All-Star Race. More events are planned. Why? Because now that the throngs and their dollars have lost interest, the powers that be can hear the voice of their actual fans above the roar.
So it shall be for the Big Ten.
NHL did the same during the 90s, but a geographic mirror image. 7 expansion teams, with 6 going to “Sun Belt” states and four more franchises all moving south or west.
Went from a league with 20 of 21 teams in Canada, the Midwest or North East in 1990 to a league with 11 of 28 teams in the Sun Belt or American West by 1999.
And then went through a major dip in popularity in the 00s as many of the most successful teams were in areas that didn’t care about hockey, several of the teams in traditional hockey markets went through bad stretches, and a work stoppage wiped out a whole season.
Since then, they’ve had four expansion teams, 3 of which have been in traditional hockey areas, and one team moved from the American South to Canada.