After their coverage of NASCAR ended with the 2014 Ford EcoBoost 400 at Homestead-Miami Speedway, ESPN has been a curious case in covering the sport.  At first, they maintained a solid presence, sending writers to nearly every race (most notably Bob Pockrass) and having Ricky Craven on-air to break down races on SportsCenter.

Over time, that has completely eroded.  Now, the only people left at the network who really know anything about the sport are Ryan McGee, Marty Smith and David Newton.  None of those three guys cover NASCAR full-time.  Newton is more or less the network's beat writer for the Carolina Panthers, while McGee and Smith host their own show and mainly cover college football.  That said, McGee and Smith still cover NASCAR to a certain degree and are very good at what they do.

Last month, McGee wrote a four-part feature on Earnhardt's crash, everything surrounding it and what has changed since then.  That was accompanied by an episode of E:60 entitled Intimidator: The Lasting Legacy of Dale Earnhardt.  This show premiered at Noon the day of the Daytona 500 on ESPN.  This was smack dab in the middle of NASCAR RaceDay on FOX Sports 1.  A solid 600,000 viewers watched.  What did they get?

While Jeremy Schaap served as the host of the show, all he did was introduce the show.  McGee narrated a piece whose main idea basically is that everything that NASCAR's learned over the past 20 years was put to the ultimate test when Ryan Newman had his crash on the last lap of last year's Daytona 500.  They passed with flying colors.

Prior to Earnhardt's death, there was a whole different mentality surrounding safety.  The drivers knew that there was a risk that you could be killed in the car, but they were ok with that.  Despite a series of fatal accidents in the 1990s, no real changes were made.

In regards to head and neck restraints such as the HANS Device, Earnhardt was on record as saying that it wasn't for him.  Privately, he chastised drivers for trying it out.  Brett Bodine said on The Scene Vault Podcast that Earnhardt made fun of him for using it in 2000.

At the time of Earnhardt's death, only five of the drivers that raced in the Daytona 500 that day were wearing head and neck restraints.  A handful of drivers (including Earnhardt) were also still wearing open-faced helmets, but everyone else had made the switch to full-faced helmets in the 1990s.

You never really heard about basilar skull fractures in the sport until 2000.  However, there were a number of them prior to that point.  Three drivers (Stanley Smith, Ernie Irvan and Rick Carelli) somehow survived such injuries and returned to win races (although in Smith's case, he never returned to any of NASCAR's National Series after his crash).  Those injuries were not referred to as such at the time.

While everyone was legitimately scared following Earnhardt's death, it took a while for the big changes to come.  The onus was on the drivers to make changes themselves.  Many drivers bought their own HANS Device, or Hutchens device in the weeks after Earnhardt's death.  NASCAR didn't officially mandate them until after Blaise Alexander was killed in an ARCA race at Charlotte in October.  Around that time, the full-face helmet was mandated as well.

The Indianapolis Motor Speedway had already been trying to create a soft wall for years.  R&D work on that was ramped up, resulting in the SAFER Barrier debuting in 2002.  They were made taller in order to account for the size of Cup cars, but they've been shown to work well.

NASCAR's R&D Center went to work on a series of ways to make the cars safer.  The ultimate result was the polarizing COT, which debuted in 2007.

In the years following Earnhardt's death, I cannot recall where I saw this, but someone stated that NASCAR's adolescence came to an end the day Earnhardt died.  The day after the crash, Mike Helton (who was more or less running NASCAR at the time) effectively proclaimed in a press conference that they didn't want any more Cup drivers dying in crashes.  With the rule changes for safety that were instituted afterwards, that has thankfully not happened in the series since.

I found that this show was a pretty good overview of the whole situation at the time and how NASCAR has changed in regards to safety over the past 20 years.  However, there is a lot more to the story.  Luckily, there is additional content that can supplement the show.

One was McGee's four-part feature that the E:60 special is based on (Part No. 1, Part No. 2, Part No. 3, Part No. 4).  This goes into more detail than time allows.  Another is Firestorm, a 10-part podcast hosted by Rick Houston, co-host of The Scene Vault Podcast along with our own Steve Waid (think of it as a spin-off of The Scene Vault Podcast).  This series goes in-depth on each of the five drivers that were killed in crashes over that dreadful 17-month period and the aftermath.  This can be found anywhere podcasts can be found.

Even though ESPN had just finished a 20-year stretch as a NASCAR broadcaster at the time of Earnhardt's death, the vast majority of the primary division of the network in Connecticut really didn't understand the gravity of the situation at the time.  Personalities like Kenny Mayne, who was the original host of rpm2night starting in 1995, did have an idea of how this would affect NASCAR and what could happen (clips of Mayne from 2001 aired in the E:60 program).  Mike Massaro (who was interviewed for the show) was in his guerrilla reporting phase for ESPN back then when the network was barred from the track and he'd have to interview drivers at the airport. 

They were front and center for the network's coverage at the time, along with John Kernan on the kneecapped rpm2night out of Charlotte.  The show was kneecapped because NASCAR disallowed rpm2night from using video from the Winston Cup and Busch Series after 2000 in order to allow FOX Sports the chance to build up their daily NASCAR show, Totally NASCAR.

Admittedly, this is not a great time in the history of NASCAR to look back on.  However, it was critical to the evolution of the sport to where we are today.

Phil Allaway is the Frontstretch newsletter manager. He can be reached at phil.allaway@frontstretch.com.  Photo is courtesy of Nigel Kinrade Photography.