This is a very exciting day for sports bettors. We’ve got the college hoops national championship game tonight as Michigan State and North Carolina battle for the right to cut down the nets, the final climax of a five month season. It’s opening day in major league baseball, with the promise of 2430 regular season games to watch and bet on before the playoffs start in October (barring a handful of rainouts that don’t get made up). Baseball’s opening day and the college basketball national championship game collectively signify the start of Spring, which brings with it the end of the NBA regular season and the beginning of the two month playoff season. Yes, today is a busy and exciting day, no question about it.
But one other bit of news came out in the last few days, a bit of news that tends to get overlooked considering everything else that’s going on. That’s not fully accurate – it gets overlooked because it’s only not big news to anyone but the most diehard of NFL fans….or guys like me, who spend most of the summer dissecting all the NFL information I can find. That big news, of course, is the NFL’s preseason schedule.
We’ve already got a list of every team’s opponents for the upcoming season, giving us a base to start looking at strength of schedule issues. Based on ‘standard’ calculations using last year’s opponents’ win/loss record, the Dolphins, Panthers, Patriots, Falcons and Bucs play the five toughest schedules in the NFL, while the Bears, Vikings, Packers, Steelers and Ravens play the five easiest slates. But every year I exploit these false strength of schedule numbers with my NFL season win total report, based on THIS year’s teams, not last year’s teams. I’ll be blogging about this stuff on a regular basis over the summer months.
And we already knew that the NFL regular season was slated to start a bit late this year. The first NFL Sunday isn’t until September 13th. Week 17 games will be played in January this year. The Super Bowl doesn’t go until February 7th.
But the announcement of the preseason schedule in my mind is a key moment. We’ve already seen a fairly active free agent period; one that will continue later this summer. The NFL draft goes later this month, with the hype already starting and the pundits talking about this year’s ‘can’t miss’ prospects the same way they tried to convince us that Vince Young, Vernon Davis, Matt Leinart, David Carr, Joey Harrington, Charles Rogers, Alex Smith, Cadillac Williams, Troy Williamson, Cedric Benson and Robert Gallery couldn’t possibly miss at the NFL level. I’ll be blogging about the NFL draft quite a bit in the weeks to come.
But for today, the topic of choice is the NFL preseason schedule. The Hall of Fame game kicks off on Sunday, August 9
th. Week 1 of the preseason starts the following Thursday, August 13
th. We’ll have a full week of preseason games in September this year, with Week 4 of the preseason going on September 3
rd and 4
th (Thursday and Friday). My NFL Season Over/Under win report is looking at a Tuesday, September 1
st release date. You can see the complete 2009 NFL preseason schedule
RIGHT HERE.
With all this info available right now, including eleven national TV games in August on NBC, CBS, Fox and ESPN (featuring all twelve playoff teams from last year), we can map out our summer accordingly. Know this much – whatever summer lull is on the horizon; whatever summer vacation lies ahead, NFL bettors must be aware – summer ends on August 9th, when the Bills and Titans kick off in Canton, Ohio.
