The Underdogs: The CW Is Emerging as a Sports Destination With College Football

The Underdogs: The CW Is Emerging as a Sports Destination With College Football Partnered by Raycom Sports and Pac-12 Studios, The CW carries big-time ACC, Pac-12 football By Brandon Costa, Director of Digital

Friday, September 20, 2024 - 2:41 pm

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The CW. Yes, The CW.

Not very long ago, even the most dialed-in media-industry type would raise a single eyebrow at the concept of The CW, the Nexstar Media Group-owned broadcast network, as a player in the ultra-competitive world of live sports coverage.

In Week 3 of the college football season, The CW broadcast a marquee matchup between No. 5 Ole Miss and Wake Forest. The game was produced by Raycom Sports.

In little more than a year and a half, The CW has built itself quite the sports portfolio. Following its surprising acquisition of the television rights of LIV Golf in January 2023, the broadcaster has leveraged that momentum to add other enticing sports properties, including events in the NASCAR Xfinity Series and WWE's NXT, along with prized studio programming like Inside the NFL.

However, thanks to deals with the Atlantic Coast Conference and the Pac-12 Conference in football and men's and women's basketball, The CW has moved into a new sports-media bracket. This fall, the network is slated to broadcast 13 ACC and 11 Pac-12 football games (the latter featuring the conference's two remaining members, Oregon State and Washington State). Already this season, The CW has had some juicy matchups, such as when Top 5 Ole Miss visited the ACC's Wake Forest.

Football is the one sport in America's segmented media world where the viewers will find you. Be the place to be on a college-football Saturday, and you're quickly a destination. And, in a season of change in college football (conference realignment, the expanded playoff, NIL), the emergence of The CW as a destination of top-tier college football games may be one of the more interesting from a media perspective. It just may be the kindling that makes The CW's flame too bright to ignore.

Being involved in college football, the second-most-popular sport in our country, is just so valuable, says Jason Wormser, SVP, CW Sports, a longtime sports-media executive who has won seven national Sports Emmy Awards during his career with ESPN, NFL Network, and FOX Sports. There's a halo effect that comes off it and helps us introduce viewers to everything that we do.

What The CW does, in addition to its entertainment lineup, is produce more than 500 hours a year of live sports programming. That number appears destined to grow over the next few years - even beginning tonight: the start of a wall-to-wall sports weekend for The CW. The NASCAR Xfinity Series airs Friday evening, along with a Friday-night college football game between San Jose State and Washington State. All Saturday afternoon, the network will broadcast LIV Golf's final tournament of the year from Dallas before switching to a college-football doubleheader of TCU at SMU and Purdue at Oregon State. Sunday afternoon caps off the LIV tournament in Dallas.

This is the story not of a sports channel on the rise but of one that is already here.

What we are, if you think about it, is the underdog, notes Wormser. On NXT, all those folks want to be in WrestleMania. In college sports, they want to go to the next step, and they want to be professionals, whether it's the NFL, the NBA, or the WNBA. In LIV Golf, they're kind of the renegades. NASCAR Xfinity Series. You see, they're all the underdog, and we're the underdog, and we're working together. It all kind of fits. We're really excited. It's a thrilling time to be involved in something brand new. We can shape it the way we want to shape it.

Growth of a Sports Brand The story of The CW begins with its launch in 2008 as a broadcast- television replacement for the shuttered WB and UPN networks. When it was acquired by Nexstar in winter 2022, a noted shift in focus to live linear programming set the company on the course to stake its flag in live sports programming.

In January 2023, heads turned when The CW announced formation of CW Sports following its acquisition of the LIV Golf, thus winning a rights agreement intensely followed in the industry as the controversial brand searched for a television home. At around the same time, Wormser came on board as a consultant to help steer the network's newly ignited sports efforts. He brought with him decades of experience in production, perhaps most notably in soccer: he was coordinating producer on ESPN's coverage of the 2010 FIFA World Cup before playing a key role in FOX Sports' emergence in soccer with the UEFA Champions League, the Premier League, MLS, and more.

This season, The CW debuted its own graphics package and theme music for its live college-football broadcasts.

Since then, the operation has quickly but strategically grown - not just in programming but in staffing as well: CW Sports Executive Director Jonathan Biles joined from FOX Sports this past summer. The most critical step, however, was to find a production partner, and, following a rights deal with the ACC in summer 2023, The CW found one in an iconic brand in sports television: Raycom Sports.

Known for its legacy of college-sports production, Raycom Sports was a natural fit with its live-sports-production pedigree and in-house fleet of production trucks. With only five weeks to prepare for its first foray into college football, The CW quickly put together what it could. On games last season, The CW still used ESPN graphics and branding, looking to keep the look and feel familiar for viewers while working through its own brand look on the backend.

It was really important that we got off on the right foot with the [ACC] and got [off] on the

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