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 full coverage of all the NHL and NBA games, see our NHL forecast and NBA forecast.
Download a full-size copy here.
Monday: Whoops, didn’t get this posted in time. I guess there must not have been any sports today, right?!
Tuesday: The FA Cup starts to get real when teams you’ve actually heard of start playing each other. Liverpool is having a disappointing year in the EPL, so they’ll be wanting to take a run at winning this tournament. Talking about tournaments, now that the Super Bowl is over, the next giant event on the sports calendar is March Madness. Get a preview of four good men’s teams tonight on ESPN and ESPN2.
Wednesday: The biggest story, really the only story of the day is HOW THE HECK THE WORLD CHAMPION U.S. WOMEN’S NATIONAL SOCCER TEAM’S OLYMPIC QUALIFYING GAME AGAINST COSTA RICA IS NOT ON NORMAL TELEVISION.
Thursday: Get your fill of a couple of winter sports with the luge world championships and snowboarding from historic Fenway Park. Then watch the last competitive NBA game for more than a week.
Friday: Date night! Set yourself up for a good Valentine’s Day weekend and give sports a miss. Nothing much to see here anyway, unless you’re an obsessive NBA fan.
Saturday: Even more ridiculous than not televising the USWNT on Wednesday against Costa Rica is missing their Olympic Qualifying game against Mexico today. It’s really wretched. Luckily, there are other fun things to watch, including a great men’s college basketball game, the U.S. Olympic men’s and women’s marathon qualifying race, and the NBA skills competition including the underrated three-point competition and the over-rated dunk competition.
Sunday: No more football until the late summer. Shucks. Make do with some golf (although, error alert, not the golf that’s listed,) soccer, competitive college basketball and exhibition professional basketball, and NHL Hockey.
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.