Well football season is finally over. Yes, there is the Pro Bowl this weekend, but that doesn't count. The Super Bowl last weekend was a decent game but it is significant that the day after the rallies honoring the respective teams' returns to their home cities, the water cooler talk and media stories are not about football but about who was or was not offended by the commercials.

I rooted for the Bears, but I don't know why. I guess I just like the city of Chicago better than the city of Indianapolis.

The racing season opens this weekend with NASCAR's Budweiser Shootout Saturday night and The Big One, the Daytona 500, next Sunday. Unfortunately, open wheeled racing is a few months off yet.

Terry Blount, writing for ESPN.com, said this week it could be a watershed season for the Big N. He notes that, even though the organization has never been reluctant to make changes, even from week to week, let alone season to season, the 2007 edition will feature more adjustments than ever.

It will include the first ever entry from a foreign car company, Toyota, in its premium series … the first ever Formula 1 driver, Juan Pablo Montoya of Colombia … the use of the so-called Car of Tomorrow in 16 Cup events … expansion of The Chase field to 12 teams and five more points for first place.

Blount says it's all about increasing the fan base. He suggests that NASCAR is welcoming the arrival of Montoya with open arms because of his potential attraction of more of the 43 million and growing Hispanic population in the U.S.

Most of the NASCAR family, Jack Roush excluded, is accepting of the entrance of Toyota. As we and other writers have noted before, the Toyota actually is the only model in the field that is made inside the borders of the U.S.

Roush fields Fords and FoMoCo has suffered a lot financially, more so than GM and D-C. As a result, the "U.S. automakers have less money to funnel to their NASCAR teams, while Toyota has a lot and plans to spend it.

As they say, "There's no substitute for cubic money."

Another developing story in the corporate offices concerns, "What your definition of "it" is."

Or rather, when AT+T bought over Cingular, did it become a different company or the same company under a new name? The reason it's important in NASCAR is that part of Nextel's sponsorship agreement is that no other cellphone companies can be team sponsors. Cingular was allowed to continue to sponsor Richard Childress Racing's No. 31, driven by Jeff Burton, because the sponsorship already existed.

AT+T is phasing out the Cingular brand and wants to continue its sponsorship of No. 31 as AT+T.

Nextel says it's a sponsorship change, AT+T says it isn't. NASCAR would like to keep them all happy.

Someone's calls keep getting dropped.