How The CW Is Betting On Sports To Attract Viewers And Advertisers

Over the summer, executives at the CW Network put together the early season college football schedule. Under a sublicensing agreement with ESPN, the CW airs 13 Atlantic Coast Conference football games each year, but the network often airs games that ESPN would rather not broadcast. This week, though, ESPN is likely envious.

On Saturday, the CW will air a matchup between No. 5 Miami and No. 18 South Florida, the first time the network will broadcast a game between two ranked teams. When the CW executives requested the game before the season began, they didn’t anticipate it would be nationally relevant. After all, South Florida was heavy underdogs to its first two opponents. The Bulls then upset then-No. 25 Boise State and then-No. 13 Florida and entered the Associated Press poll for the first time since 2017. Miami, meanwhile, defeated then-No. 6 Notre Dame in its season opener and moved up five spots in the poll.

“Sometimes you get lucky,” said the CW president Brad Schwartz, laughing. “We certainly did.”

Still, the CW’s good fortune is part of a strategy it started in 2022 when Nexstar Media Group, Inc., the largest owner of local television channels in the U.S., acquired a 75% stake in the CW. At the time, the CW focused on entertainment programming, primarily for young adults. But Nexstar wanted to go in a different direction.

“They know what their stations want and what works locally,” Schwartz, who became the network’s president in November 2022, said in an interview. “We have hundreds of local television stations in local markets, doing local news, doing local traffic, doing local community stuff, and the product that still brings the largest simultaneous audience together is sports…Sports is the thing that can bring the most amount of people together at the same time and to be able to activate locally in the communities.”

The network signed its first sports deal in 2023, a two-year agreement with LIV Golf. Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund launched LIV in 2022 as a competitor to the PGA Tour.

The first two days of LIV on the CW attracted audiences of fewer than 300,000 viewers, significantly below the PGA Tour event that weekend, and the ratings never made a dent compared with the PGA Tour. The CW is no longer airing LIV events, as Fox Sports earlier this year signed an agreement with the upstart league. But the CW remains committed to sports now more than ever.

The CW will air more than 500 hours of sports programming this year, accounting for more than 40% of its total programming hours, according to Schwartz. The CW is the fifth-largest broadcast network and the eighth-ranked network overall, which Nexstar CEO Perry Sook said on the company’s second quarter earnings call last month “is a direct result of the success of our programming strategy, including the introduction of sports.”

Nexstar in August disclosed that the CW’s primetime ratings have increased for five consecutive quarters. The CW does not turn a profit, but Nexstar has said it expects the CW will be profitable next year.

The CW struck its ACC licensing agreement with ESPN in 2023. It includes 50 games each year through the 2026-27 school year, including 13 football games, 28 men’s basketball games and nine women’s basketball games. The network this year also extended its broadcast partnership with the Pac-12 conference through the 2030-31 season. Ten of the league’s 12 schools departed last August, but the conference plans on expanding to nine teams starting next school year. The CW each year will air 13 regular season Pac-12 football games, 35 regular season men’s basketball games and 15 regular season women’s basketball games, as well as the semifinals and championship game of the Pac-12 women’s basketball tournament.

During a Goldman Sachs conference on Monday, Sook said the company is communicating with the ACC and Pac-12 about adding more women’s basketball games this year, too.

Besides college sports, the CW has rights with smaller professional leagues, including the Professional Bowlers Association, Professional Bull Riders, AVP beach volleyball and the NASCAR Xfinity Series, a second-tier circuit to the NASCAR Cup Series. The CW last year also began airing the WWE NXT, the WWE’s developmental league, as part of a five-year agreement.

Of course, the CW’s sports rights portfolio pales in comparison to ESPN. NBC, CBS and Fox. Still, Sook said at the Goldman Sachs conference that it took Fox Sports several years before it struck a deal with the National Football League to air games starting in the 1994 season.

“We are not in position to outbid any established entity at this point in time,” Sook said. He added that “we’re happy to talk to anybody that would be looking for superior distribution. We have folks on our air today that were offered more money by streamers, but they wanted to build the brand, wanted to be over-the-air and realized how special that is and how scarce those opportunities are.”

Schwartz, though, admitted the CW faces a challenging group of competitors that not only includes traditional broadcast and cable networks but also deep-pocketed technology companies such as Netflix and Amazon. Plus, the rights for most major professional leagues and college conferences are locked up for at least a few years.

“The sports rights business is not for the faint of heart,” Schwartz said. “It’s hard. Everything in our industry is hard. We’re doing our best to keep growing.”

On Saturday, the CW could reach one of the largest sports audiences with the Miami-South Florida game, although the network’s ratings are much smaller than their broadcast network rivals. Awful Announcing, a website covering the sports media industry, reported on Tuesday that the network’s highest sports audience was 1.8 million viewers for a NASCAR Xfinity Series race, while its college football record is 1.33 million for a North Alabama-Florida State game two years ago.

“We are only in the first inning,” Schwartz said. We’ve only just started this (sports strategy) 24 months ago…We’re still in the early days of this, but (Saturday’s game) is the culmination of everything we’ve been building the past two years, and we’re going to keep going from here. I don’t want to make light of it. It is a very big, very exciting weekend for the CW.”