If you are a sports fan or if you live with a sports fan then your weekly schedule becomes inextricably linked with what sporting events are on at what times during each week. The conflict between missing a sporting event for a poorly committed to social event and missing an appealing social event to watch a game is an important balancing act in any kind of romantic, familial, or business relationship between a sports fan and a non-sports fan. To help facilitate this complicated advanced mathematics, Dear Sports Fan has put together a table showing the most important sporting events of the upcoming week. Print it out, put it on your fridge, and go through it with your scheduling partner.
This does not include MLB baseball games. There are so many of those every day that another approach is needed. That approach is our special Daily MLB Forecast. Same deal, for the most part, with NFL football games. For those, see our NFL Forecast.
Download a full-size copy here.
Monday: Football rules the day. Spend the morning talking about the weekend’s NFL action. Spend the afternoon enjoying a mid-table British Premier League soccer match between Everton and West Brom. Spend the evening watching an excellent NFL football game, the last of the weekend, between the Green Bay Packers and Kansas City Chiefs.
Tuesday: The UEFA Champions League match between Barcelona and Beyer Leverkusen will be the first Barcelona has played since losing its star player, its heart and soul, Lionel Messi. This may actually make it a more interesting game to watch, both because it should give Beyer Leverkusen a better chance of winning, but also because it gives us a chance to see how Barcelona plays without Messi. In the evening, its game three of the Eastern Conference finals between the WNBA’s New York Liberty and Indiana Fever. Since the WNBA plays best two out of three game series in their playoffs, this is a single elimination game with a finals berth on the line.
Wednesday: The Italian soccer team Juventus is having a funny year. Runners up in last year’s Champions League, you would expect that they are one of the top teams in the world. This doesn’t seem to be true. They’re way down in the Italian Serie A standings. A win against the Spanish side, Sevilla, may give them some confidence to take back to domestic league play. As the weather gets colder, baseball fans start thinking about the playoffs. Today’s featured game, between the St. Louis Cardinals and Pittsburgh Pirates, could easily be a preview of an upcoming playoff matchup.
Thursday: The NFL has made a strong bid to own Thursday nights, and this week’s game between the rival Baltimore Ravens and Pittsburgh Steelers should be a physical, intriguing game. The Ravens are without a win so far this year and the Steelers will be without their quarterback, Ben Roethlisberger, because of a knee injury. Nonetheless, the biggest game of the night is in the NWSL. It’s the championship game on Fox Sports 1 between FC Kansas City and Seattle Reign FC. This is a rematch of last year’s title game, which Kansas City won 2-1. It will feature a slew of players we saw in the World Cup, including Americans Becky Sauerbrunn, Amy Rodriguez, Heather O’Reilly, and Lauren Holiday, as well as Australian international, Katrina Gorry on Kansas City and USA goalie Hope Solo and midfielder Megan Rapinoe on Seattle. My guess is that Seattle wins this one. They’ve looked near-unbeatable for most of the season.
Friday: Date night! Relive your college days with a college volleyball rivalry between Duke and UNC on ESPN U at 6 p.m. ET and then get all prepped up for an Ivy League soccer game between Princeton and Columbia at 7 p.m.
Saturday: There’s a slew of good college football games between top 25 ranked teams, the biggest of which may be a newly vulnerable-looking Alabama vs. Georgia. We also have a somewhat parallel game in British soccer between up-and-coming Southampton, and a similarly vulnerable former champion, Chelsea. The most exciting match of the day isn’t in either form of football, it’s in Rubgy where England plays Australia in the Rugby World Cup. If you’re in the Boston area, come watch it with the Dear Sports Fan Viewing Party Meetup group and me!!
Sunday: An American football game invades London to start today’s sporting schedule. For perhaps (?) the first time, the NFL has sent a divisional game to England. The Miami Dolphins and New York Jets are both coming off disappointing losses and will both be determined to win in London before taking the next week off. In British British football, Arsenal vs. Manchester City is about as big of a game as you could get. Combine these two events with the first game of the WNBA finals, the AAA 400 in NASCAR, and a West Coast MLS showdown between Los Angeles and Seattle, and we’ve got another excellent and full Sunday of sports.
Caveat — This forecast is optimized for the general sports fan, not a particular sports fan. As such, your mileage may vary. For instance, you or the sports fan in your life is a fan of a particular team, then a regular season MLB baseball game or MLS soccer game may be more important on a particular day than anything on the forecast above. Use the calendar as a way to facilitate conversation about scheduling, not as the last word on when there are sports to watch.