Canzano: The CW President sounds off on Pac-12
"We’re hoping it can lead to other things."
We’re a month away from the start of the college football season. The Pac-12 Conference is an existential battle — with its two teams fighting for visibility and traction while plotting the next move.
The CW acquired the rights to 11 of the league’s 13 home football games this season. The two others will air on FOX or FS1. The plan is for The CW to add the Pac-12 games to a Saturday lineup that includes ACC football games, professional golf, and NASCAR. The network is also launching a Saturday college football studio show, produced and broadcast from the Pac-12’s Bay Area production facility.
Oregon State and Washington State say they’ll get better TV exposure in 2024 on The CW (available in 125 million households) than the Beavers and Cougars did in 2023 when they were on the Pac-12 Network (15 million households).
Dennis Miller, the president of The CW, sat down for a 1-on-1 conversation about expectations for the football season, his network’s sports strategy, and why adding Oregon State and Washington State made sense.
Will The CW hire the Pac-12’s production facility to produce other live sports events? How might the TV network help OSU and WSU boost their brands? Will pairing ACC and Pac-12 games back-to-back result in stronger viewership? And will new ACC members Stanford and Cal ever play as lead-ins for the Beavers and Cougars?
My Q-and-A with Dennis Miller:
Q: I was looking at how the ACC football games did with ratings last season and it looked like there was some traction that resulted in The CW opening its mind to more sports opportunities. What’s your strategy with live sports programming?
A: Yeah, it did. It started with LIV Golf when they were looking for a broadcast outlet and that kind of got things started. The CW had never had any sports on, so it was a building process of trying to get audiences to know where to find things and where to look on CW stations for sports. And then the ACC, through Raycom came together and we determined — no big surprise — very quickly, when you had good games, you were going to get a rating, and when you had lesser games, you got less of a rating.
The ACC was looking for broader reach, which is kind of the name of the game right now. So that came together nicely. And then we started building a relationship with the Raycom folks and with ESPN to make sure we were getting in front of the athletic directors and the teams to say, “Hey, we can bring your product out to over 100 stations here and show you 100 percent reach.” Then NASCAR came along and the WWE came along. So we kind of have a flywheel for the first time this fall where we’ll have a circulation of sports fans, many of which cross over between these various sports.
Q: How does the Pac-12 fit into that?
A: We had started conversations a long time ago when the Pac-12 was figuring out what they were going to do and before some of the attrition that occurred there. We were fortunate enough with our schedule and with what the Pac-12 and Oregon State and Washington State were looking for, that we said, “Hey, we can figure this out.”
We kind of put a chessboard together of how to make games work. So we’re going to have multiple double-headers between the ACC and Pac-12 and we'll even have some 13-14 hour sports days between NASCAR, LIV, and basketball, and football. So, yeah, we’re going to have 500 hours of sports starting in the fall, and we’re very fortunate that the Pac-12 is going to be part of it.
I live down near UCLA and I went to Berkeley and went to a lot of those Stanford-Berkeley games and have some friends who went to Oregon State and Washington State. So I’m gonna be an eager fan as well as the network guy.
Q: The TV ratings for Washington State and Oregon State football games have been encouraging and more than respectable in the last few seasons. How did that play into your mindset as you were evaluating the Pac-12’s football inventory?
A: Yeah, we went through a whole research analysis of Oregon State and Washington State. Then we looked at where our overlap is with stations and what we could accomplish, and some of the matchups that they were starting to talk about. So it just felt like, “Hey, this is a good fit.” We’re moving in and we’re going to be able to take advantage of the momentum that they have. So we’re very excited to bring them into The CW Sports Saturday here.
Q: The ACC football games will be paired on Saturdays with Pac-12 games. You’re also adding studio shows and some shoulder programming. It looks like a shift in mindset in an industry where live sports programming is driving viewership. Am I reading that right?
A: There’s some marketplace confusion about where people find their sports. You’ve got multiple streaming services, you’ve got cable networks, you’ve got sports dividing up the rights amongst various holders. The good news is that they’ll find the majority of their sports in one place. We’ll have all 33 Xfinity races in one place. We’ll have wrestling 52 weeks live on Tuesday night. We have Inside the NFL on Friday night. So we’re trying to provide some habits and the ability to form some habits. And then Saturdays will be our most active sports day. We’ll go anywhere from 3.5 to 14 hours of sports on Saturdays. We’re hoping that audiences will be able to know, “Hey, I can find my team, on this day, on a regular basis here,” which we think helps with some of the consumer confusion that’s out there right now.
Q: One of the real frustrations of Pac-12 fans is that they struggled to get the Pac-12 Network on their TVs. The distribution was a failure. The Pac-12 Network was available in only 15 percent of US households. The CW is available in 100 percent of households. How do you drive that awareness?
A: I think it’s our job to provide the kind of programming that they’re wanting, first of all, that they want to go see. We think the Pac-12 and the other sports will help do that. We have to be smart and partner with the teams and sponsors to drive awareness on-channel and off-channel. We do a lot on-channel. We’re going to be doing more off-channel. We’ve got to take advantage of the social media followings of a lot of the athletes on these teams because that’s a big driver to finding sports today. So I think all of those things are in play.
The studio show should be helpful. We’re doing that in conjunction with the Pac-12. We just have to move all those levers in order to get people — because they’ve never come to The CW — to find these kinds of sports. So it’s a process and there’s some friction in the system, and it’s our job to kind of overcome that friction.
Q: The Pac-12 Enterprises production facility and its experience with producing hundreds of live games appears to be a benefit. Will the Pac-12’s production facility produce other things for The CW? How far can that relationship go?
A: We’re building out the facility to be agnostic so we can cover the ACC, we can cover the Pac-12. Obviously, just given their history and the quality of the work, we’re hoping it can lead to other things. We’re talking to other rights holders all the time about what else is available. What else will drive an audience? What could work? We have Sunday afternoons that are fairly open still on The CW, and that’s some real estate we would like to populate with high-quality programming.
I think coming out of the Olympics, as you know, there is always going to be a new set of sports and stars that appear. We have Snoop Dogg and the Arizona Bowl coming up, and Snoop is a consistent presence throughout the Olympics, which is great to see. I think with the teams and with the schools here, we’re going to just try to identify more product. Live sports and broadcasts have gone together well for a long time. I think the IP holders like the reach of it and the consistency there. So we’re hoping to do more with the Pac-12 going forward.
Q: You touched on the marketing, and there’s some fresh synergy between sports and The CW. How might The CW help the two Pac-12 teams market themselves? Those schools have a story to tell this season.
A: We’re going to look at cross-promotional opportunities. We produce a lot of shows outside of sports. We have 15 hours of prime time to fill each week. It’s from non-fiction to scripted to some of the franchises we have. I think cross-pollinating some of those folks. It would be great to see Bill Belichick on Inside the NFL talking about what’s happening in college sports and the studio show talking about some of the other stuff happening on The CW. We’re just now getting to the place where we’re coming up with ideas and ways we can cross-pollinate between the various platforms we have and the various shows. I think you’ll see some creative use of The CW’s assets with our new partners.
Q: I was looking at The CW’s highest-rated broadcasts from 2023. Those ACC football games were among the most-watched broadcasts. They moved the needle. How do you stay true to what The CW was intended to be while also moving into more sports programming?
A: The CW started with UPN and WB coming together. It was really driven by the needs of Warner and CBS, which was to push through a lot of our dramas that could be sold globally around the world. That model worked really well and they carved out a niche in the young-adult audience that was second to none long before the streamers came around, and the marketplace was altered and young adults left a lot of what was on broadcast and are not watching a lot of broadcast today. Whether that’s (due to) social media or getting their content from certain streamers, whether they’re watching Stranger Things or Wednesday or shows that The CW was so well known for.
Broadcast today, you have to be broad. You have to reach a fairly wide audience. You have to have a reason to show up at a time period, which, as you know, you can binge on streamers. Broadcasting is really: “OK, why am I tuning in Wednesday at 8 p.m. or Saturday at 3 p.m.?” So when Nextstar bought The CW a year and a half ago, — they’re the largest broadcasting group in the United States — they had a front-row seat on how the playbook works. And it was, “How do we deliver a must-have product to the consumer that will lead into their 10 p.m. programming?”
Oftentimes that’s news or network programming for an audience that was somewhat older than the young-adult audience The CW used to go after. The world has changed. The marketplace is different. You’re seeing it happening with NBC and having two NBA games now going during the week as part of the new package if that all holds. Nextstar was very considerate that if we want to drive the value of our 30-plus CW stations here, including in the big markets like WGN (Chicago) and KTLA (Los Angeles) and places like that, we’d better have a very robust sports presence in order to be a part of where the audiences are going.
Q: The ACC broadcast of Florida State vs. North Alabama last season drew 1.3 million viewers, The CW’s largest prime-time audience in six years. Some of the other ACC games didn’t do as well. (Georgia Tech vs. Wake Forest drew 332,000 viewers, for example.) If you carry ACC and Pac-12 games back to back, along with a studio show, The CW should expect to see growth. What are your expectations for the season?
A: We think we’re going to keep building. As I mentioned before, we only had LIV Golf, 14 events here. That was a great start, but it doesn’t build circulation on a regular basis. That was a new league for viewers to discover. So now, with 500 hours of sports here, we’re going to have pretty broad sports fans coming to the network that never came to those individual stations. So we think that flywheel effect will start to kick in. We think we’re going to see meaningful growth in our ratings across all of the franchises. If you look at what NASCAR is doing on USA Network and on NBC and what wrestling is doing for USA Network, those are top-10, top-20 shows each week in the broadcast world and cable world. So we are going to have a lot more eyeballs coming to us. It’s up to us to deliver a good product. So if we have a decent matchup in basketball and football, we think we’re going to deliver substantially higher ratings than we were previously.
Q: Will there be a streaming element?
A: Each IP situation is different. In some places, we have the streaming rights, like with LIV Golf and other places like the ACC. Those games are not streamed anywhere, including ESPN+ or the ACC app. So, it varies. It’s fairly idiosyncratic. But we’re starting a sports hub on The CW digital offering here. We’ll have next-day availability for most of this product, and then we’re going to populate it with some off-network titles that we’re going to get so people can learn more about the racers, more about the wrestlers, more about the football and basketball players. So you’ll see more of that on the app than we had historically.
Q: You have former Pac-12 members Stanford and Cal in the ACC. You have Oregon State and Washington State on The CW. Will there be a strategy in trying to put the Stanford-Cal games as a lead-in to the Pac-12 games?
A: We brought on a few additional sports experts and scheduling folks to look at what are the right mixes of teams to really start to bring that Pac-12 fan into The CW. That’s going to be another new audience for us here. So, yeah, stay tuned. I think it’s going to be pretty interesting.
Thank you for reading. I appreciate all who support, subscribe, and share this independent endeavor with friends and family. If you haven’t already — please consider subscribing and/or gifting a subscription to someone who would enjoy it.
This is an independent reader-supported project, with both free and paid subscriptions. Those who opt for the paid edition are providing vital assistance to bolster my independent coverage.
CW chief strikes me as a smart, competent, self-aware, reasonably transparent guy. Imagine if the conference commissioner working on the media rights deal had been smart, competent, self-aware and reasonably transparent.
It seems there are more than just ESPN and FSN who want sports programming. TNT just lost its bid for the NBA. CW wants programming. Amazon has expanded its sports footprint with the NFL. Apple, Google, Netflix, Youtube, Microsoft are other potential bidders with lots of money in their bank accounts. Looks like OSU / WSU are playing their cards correctly by not panicking and giving away their assets