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.
For detail on the all-popular, all-powerful NFL, which groups most of its games on Sunday afternoons, see our NFL Forecast.
Download a full-size copy here.
Monday: The Toronto Blue Jays try desperately to avoid going down 3-0 to the Kansas City Royals in the American League Championship Series (the semifinals of Major League Baseball’s playoffs.) In the NFL, the Philadelphia Eagles and New York Giants try desperately not to lose to their arch-rivals. There’s a lot of desperation going around for a Monday night.
Tuesday: A playoff baseball double-header is nothing to mess with. Watch game four of the ALCS, which could be an elimination game followed by game three of the more lovable and therefore more heart wrenching NLCS between the New York Mets and Chicago Cubs. If you need a fix of soccer before the baseball starts, there’s a full afternoon of UEFA Champions League action. The only game on a channel you probably have is Arsenal vs. Bayern Munich.
Wednesday: Unless the Royals sweep the Blue Jays, we’ll get another juicy MLB playoff double-header today — likely the last of the season. In the evening, the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team continues its victory tour with a friendly game against Brazil. In addition, we’ll be doing a Dear Sports Fan Meetup to watch the Boston Bruins play the Philadelphia Flyers. If you’re in the Boston area, join us!
Thursday: The highlight of the day is a pivotal Game Five in the NLCS between the Mets and Cubs. That should overshadow the Thursday Night Football game between the Seattle Seahawks and San Francisco 49ers but thanks to gambling, fantasy football, and sheer perversity, the NFL game will still be watched by way more people. Help even the scales. Watch baseball.
Friday: Date night! If the ALCS between the Royals and Blue Jays has been settled by now, you’re free to have a non-sports date. If they’re still going, you might find a romantic bar… with a TV to be a good spot for a cozy get-together.
Saturday: It’s an oddly weak slate of college football games. You can tell by the fact that I had room to sneak my alma mater, Rutgers, onto the featured games list, even though they’re likely to be beaten by 50 points. If both MLB playoff series are still going on, they will more than make up for it. This has the potential to be a legendary afternoon and evening of baseball!
Sunday: If you want, you could watch about 15 hours in a row of NFL football today or 15 hours of soccer. It’s an incredibly versatile day. If there’s a Game Seven in the NLCS between the Cubs and the Mets, that would be a bonus of the sort that dwarfs the salary it’s augmenting.
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.