Inside The CW’s sports evolution

The CW, once a favorite network of teenage girls known for creating shows such as “Gossip Girl” and “Riverdale,” is now a home for golf, NASCAR and football.

CW Sports formed in 2023 when the Nexstar-owned network acquired the broadcast rights to LIV Golf, kicking off a rapid transformation of the broadcast channel born from the UPN and WB merger in 2006.

Nexstar Media Group acquired a controlling interest in The CW in October 2022, and quickly began to shift its strategy.

“It became very apparent that the young adult audience, that we liked so much previously, had migrated to bingeing and streamers. Trying to get an 18- to 34-year-old to pay attention on Wednesday at 8 was no longer a very smart strategy,” said CW President Dennis Miller. “There’s a lot of sentimental and romantic attachment to what The CW was, and I respect that and get that. But you’ve got to go where the customer is today.”

After The CW acquired the rights to LIV, “the phone started ringing,” said Miller. The network then locked in 50 ACC college football and basketball broadcast games each season in a four-year deal through Raycom Sports, which previously produced syndicated broadcasts for the conference. “We fight hard to get the best things we can get, because we’re third in the pecking order between ESPN, ACC Network and then us,” said Miller. “College football is enormously valuable to us.”

The CW had conversations with the Pac-12 before conference realignment, securing the rights to 11 games with Oregon State and Washington State. “They were thinking they were going to put a large media rights deal together with the usual suspects,” said Miller. “That did not work out so well, and so we had a separate conversation about four months later.”

The CW could be interested in expanding its relationship with the Pac-12, now that the conference has added four schools.

“Being incumbent with the Pac-12 teams is a really good place to be. We’re getting to know each other, building relationships, working with their production teams, getting to know the athletic directors,” said Miller. “We have more real estate than some of our peers in broadcast, because they’re so full, where they’ll relegate things to their streaming network or to their [ad-supported video on demand] service or to a lesser distributed cable network.”

The CW’s seven-year NASCAR deal officially kicked off over the weekend with an Xfinity Series race in Bristol, Tenn. The CW now has 500 hours of sports, with Miller describing most of the deals as “second tier” to the main sport (WWE NXT versus Smackdown, NASCAR Xfinity Series versus Cup Series, etc).

“We’ve got a lot of up-and-comers here. We’ve got to tell their stories, got to promote from one to the other and hopefully what we’ll see this quarter should be very revealing,” said Miller. “Can we create a flywheel between all these sports?”

The CW has a broadcast opening Sunday afternoon it’s looking to fill, with Miller citing MLB, the Pac-12 and volleyball as possibilities. “You’ll see more sports coming to The CW over the next six to 12 months, and it’s going to be a good thing,” he said.