“I’ve been told directly by each of the companies having challenging times that one of the things that works best for them is NASCAR,” chairman Brian France said earlier this month.

That said, France also is on record as saying NASCAR could survive without all the manufacturers.

How the individual teams will fare without their biggest sponsors is less certain. The flow of sponsorship money is slowing and the difference between the haves and have-nots in NASCAR is enormous.

“I think every property, be it a sports event or a sports team or a state fair, for that matter, that has sponsorships in financial services or automotive categories should be doing all they can to protect those relationships,” said Bill Chipps, senior editor of the IEG Sponsorship Report that tracks sponsorship spending.

Ganis thinks the future of another hallmark of sports endorsement and sponsorship — the beer industry — could be up in the air. The recent purchase of Anheuser-Busch by InBev will essentially push the Busch family out the door, he says. They were always big proponents of sports advertising and nobody is quite sure how the InBev brass will approach it.

Ganis also says it’s easy to project that the drain on America’s biggest businesses will hurt athletes’ pocketbooks — not just the endorsement side, but the salary side, too.

Cash-strapped companies figure to also be buying less signage in the stadiums, fewer corporate suites and ticket licenses. Credit is no longer as easy to obtain, even for billionaire owners. Meanwhile, the sacred cow of these leagues, TV dollars, could eventually get squeezed if advertising money dries up.

None of it bodes well for cash flow. NFL commissioner Roger Goodell acknowledged he’s looking at 2009 as a barometer of how far the bad economy reaches into the NFL.

There also is the issue of the collective-bargaining agreement, which needs to be renewed by February 2010 to avoid a season without a salary cap.

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“There’s a reasonable chance the NBA and NFL are going to have periods of time when their sports are not playing, unless their players associations get a serious dose of reality,” Ganis said. “Owners have decided that continual exponential growth in cheap and available credit are both history, and that they’re not going to accept a generally break-even proposition while paying players extraordinary amounts they’re paid.”

Said Morgenstein: “Those people used to making $12 million sitting on the bench in the NBA, those guys are going to get crushed. The system has to change. They’re naive thinking it’s not.”

Add it all up and it means many athletes are going to have to rethink their strategies for making more money off the field.

How much money is there to be had? That’s the multimillion-dollar question.

“We see what’s going on in the world, we see what’s happening,” says Eisenbud, who manages Sharapova. “I don’t think any business is immune to what’s going on.”

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