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: A strange drought in a flood season for sports. The only high-profile or interesting sports I could find on television is the NFL’s Monday Night Football game between the San Diego Chargers and Chicago Bears. Both teams have been wildly disappointing this year but wildly entertaining nonetheless.
Tuesday: If Monday was a drought, Tuesday is a… something worse than a drought. There’s a good hockey game on tonight and a live fight I know nothing about. Watch the hockey or even better, go to an opera or something.
Wednesday: Now we’re getting somewhere! Start your evening with women’s volleyball, shift over to ice hockey, and then make a night cap out of the San Antonio Spurs playing the Portland Trailblazers in an early-season NBA game.
Thursday: Football, American and soccer sweep back in to rescue the sports week. The World Cup is the biggest international event in men’s soccer, but the European Championships are close. We get to watch qualifying matches for both tournaments today! The best is a World Cup qualifying match between Argentina and Brazil, two of the best soccer countries in the world, at 7 p.m. There’s also a rivalry game in the NFL on national television — the New York Jets vs. the Buffalo Bills at 8:30 p.m.
Friday: Date night! If you live on or near a college campus, you might get caught up in the excitement of another men’s college basketball season beginning. Otherwise, you may be interested in watching the U.S. Men’s National Soccer team begin their run to qualify for the 2018 World Cup. No, they’re not as good relative to their competition as the women are, but they’re still worth rooting for.
Saturday: Lots of good rivalries in college football but none are likely to be bigger than the rivalry game between Denmark and Sweden in European Championship qualifying play.
Sunday: Start your morning with some French Toast and Brazilian Grand Prix action. There’s car racing and golf pretty much all day, plus the normal NFL football, all day too. Sprinkled in are a couple of interesting soccer games. Over in Europe, the once great soccer nation, Hungary, plays against Norway. Closer to home, two men’s college teams will play for the American Athletic Conference championship.
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.