by ITM Staff
Big changes are coming to the Triple Crown, and the story of how we got here is more tangled — and more about television than tradition — than many of the headlines suggest. To sort through what we know and what we don’t, PTF sat down with NBC Sports’ Randy Moss, a longtime advocate for fixing the spacing of the Triple Crown races and one of the sharpest voices in the sport. What follows is our distillation of that conversation; the full talk is well worth your time on the ITM YouTube channel.
(For Moss’s earlier, essential rundown, catch his appearance on this week’s TDN Writers’ Room as well.)
Where things stand
Let’s start with the two announcements from this past week. On Monday, Churchill Downs Inc. and the New York Racing Association unveiled a six-race, season-long championship series for three-year-olds — a $5 million bonus pool, three races at Churchill and three at NYRA tracks, culminating in a championship event at Churchill in September. The Preakness was conspicuously absent. And the only specific date in that entire release was the one confirming the Belmont Stakes would stay put on June 5, right where it has always been.
Two days later, at a press conference with Maryland Governor Wes Moore and NBC Sports, came the other shoe: NBC had won the rights to keep the Preakness through 2032, and the race would move to a Sunday, 22 days after the Kentucky Derby. As Moss frames it, that sequence — NYRA and Churchill first, Maryland second — is not an accident of timing. More on that in a bit.
Follow the television money
Moss’s central point is that the television rights, not tradition, drove this. NBC’s Preakness contract was expiring, and the rights were in play — Fox bid aggressively, and by Moss’s account NBC, and reportedly others, were in the mix too. The wrinkle: Fox and NYRA are business partners through NYRA Bets, a relationship that has been financially significant for NYRA and has expanded racing’s presence on Fox. Moss says he can barely separate the two entities in this negotiation.
Here is the detail that raised eyebrows, which Moss says he has confirmed with multiple people in the sport: NYRA and Fox were willing to move the Belmont back a week to give the Preakness more breathing room — but only if Fox won the Preakness TV rights. In other words, the spacing of the Triple Crown, the fix everyone claims to want, was tied to a broadcast deal. “It’s sort of like the all-is-fair-in-love-and-war situation,” Moss said of the leverage play, adding that he didn’t initially think Fox and NYRA would follow through on it.
Then, about a week before the announcements, Maryland told NYRA and Fox that NBC — not Fox — would get the Preakness. That, Moss believes, is when the plan changed.
Why the Monday rush
If NBC kept the rights, why did NYRA and Churchill hurry out an admittedly — as Moss put it, and we agreed — “undercooked” press release on Monday, two days ahead of Maryland’s news? Moss’s read is that it was a smart, deliberate move to control the narrative. By announcing first, with the Belmont locked on its traditional June 5 date, NYRA could position itself as the party holding the line on tradition — and cast Maryland, when it moved the Preakness two days later, as the one disrupting the Triple Crown.
Had the order been reversed, Moss argues, the obvious question at Maryland’s press conference would have been: what about the Belmont? And the answer — that NYRA wouldn’t move it — would have made NYRA the villain in the court of public opinion. The Monday release was an attempt to flip that script.
The uncomfortable truth: does NYRA even want a strong Preakness?
Moss went further than he had elsewhere on one point. A strong Preakness in the current five-week format, he argues, isn’t actually in NYRA’s selfish interest. What benefits NYRA short-term is a Derby winner running against a weak Preakness field, then arriving at the Belmont with a Triple Crown on the line — because that is when, in PTF’s words, the box office goes crazy. It’s a pointed way of explaining a potential reason why the spacing problem has festered for so long, and why NYRA has repeatedly declined to move the Belmont despite overtures from Maryland going back years.
Is it actually a disaster — or a negotiation?
For all the obituaries, Moss cautions against reading this as final. He describes himself, like PTF, as a wide-eyed optimist, and he suspects this is an ongoing negotiation rather than a done deal — nothing here, he notes, feels like a properly finished agreement. He holds out hope that cooler heads prevail, that the Belmont eventually moves a week even for 2027, and that the Preakness could one day be folded into the series rather than stranded beside it. He’s candid that even a one-week Belmont move will probably not be enough on its own to bring the Derby’s best horses to Baltimore — but it can’t hurt.
He also floated a genuine long-shot — a “nuclear option” he initially dismissed and has warmed to as a possibility: the Preakness pulling up anchor entirely and moving to Fourth of July weekend as the final leg of a reordered Triple Crown, with the Belmont in the middle. It blows up tradition, he concedes — but if the Triple Crown is going to be blown up anyway, it’s an option Maryland may keep in its back pocket.
Show me the money
One thing Moss flagged as conspicuously missing from Maryland’s announcement: the purse. There was no figure at all. And here he was explicit that he was speculating — “this is me, I don’t have the facts on this” — but he expects Maryland to come out swinging financially. His guess is that the Preakness purse matches the Belmont’s, likely paired with incentives — a bonus for a Derby winner who runs back, or an outsized purse — to make the race more attractive on its own terms, series or no series. Maryland has invested too much in the new Pimlico, he argues, to take this lying down.
The fall problem
We pressed Moss on the piece of the series we find most puzzling: a championship race in September, when college football begins swallowing the sports-television landscape. He didn’t sugarcoat it. If you want to understand the challenge of capturing mainstream sports attention during football season, he said, call Breeders’ Cup Limited — they’ll give you a dissertation on it. His read is that the September date exists mostly because Churchill needed a way to slot in a third race for its side of the series, not because the calendar is ideal.
The bottom line
Moss admits he’s less optimistic than he was a week ago — he’d thought the sport was further along toward a sensible fix than this week revealed. But he isn’t writing an obituary. Asked to sum it up, he embraced the framing we’ve used all week: the Triple Crown isn’t dead. It might just take a year off. It’s early days, the details aren’t written, and there’s a version of this story — Preakness folded in, calendar tightened, cooler heads prevailing — that leaves the sport better than the frayed status quo. We’ll be watching closely. So will everyone else.
Watch the full conversation with Randy Moss on the ITM YouTube channel, and catch Randy’s racing coverage on NBC Sports.
