The ACC will be moving its syndicated football broadcasts to The CW beginning this fall, the conference announced Thursday.
The first broadcast will feature Cincinnati at Pitt on Saturday, Sept. 9.
“We are thrilled to be adding The CW to our weekly television lineup for ACC football and basketball games,” said ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips, Ph.D. “The CW’s national distribution will directly benefit our student-athletes, teams, alumni and fans. We appreciate ESPN and Raycom working together and look forward to the partnership with The CW.”
Raycom Sports will continue to produce the broadcasts for the league. These games were previously available nationwide via RSNs.
“We are committed to making The CW a destination for live, appointment-viewing sporting events,” said Dennis Miller, President, The CW Network. “The ACC is home to some of the most decorated college football and basketball teams in the country and we look forward to welcoming these avid sports fans to the network as we continue to broaden our audience.”
“The CW is going to be a terrific partner for the legendary ACC,” said Hunter Nickell, CEO of Raycom Sports. “The longest-running television relationship in college sports belongs to the ACC and Raycom Sports. Now The CW brings national broadcast network coverage to the great fans of these 15 famous schools.”
Future matchups will be announced as part of the regular ACC television assignment window.
the crosswalk?
This beats distributing the games via the hodgepodge that is Diamond Sports Group’s Bally Sports chain of RSNs. This is a huge upgrade in distribution for Raycom.
Clearly the CW in not in the same league as ESPN/ABC, NBC, or CBS, but if they have ACC games early and PAC-10/12 games late they’ll be in my remote control rotation on football Saturdays.
Big move for the ACC. This takes those broadcasts from being on regional cable (where you might not get the specific network the game is on with your cable/streaming service) to national TV. Also, sometimes those broadcasts didn’t clear in some cities because the network in that area had another sporting event or program to televise. Now all those games should be available every week to the entire nation.
As an aside the games on CW will be free. You don’t need cable to watch CW and the CW app and website are also free.. The ACC could have as many as four games on free TV in any given week with one guaranteed with this deal. Overall a good move for the ACC.
What’s old is new again. For a lot of people this is where these games would have been broadcast 20 some odd years ago (back when the original ESPN+ existed along with the old Jefferson Pilot). I think this is a great move.
I was thinking the same thing.
Deja vu all overagain. Forget 20 years, just before the ACCN went live we had our local affiliate broadcast the ACC game of the week.
Great news for us in central Va.
This should at least keep teams Like Florida State and Clemson Happy, which means they will want to stay in the ACC.
$$$$$ to stay happy. No mention of money in this article.