The Sports Calendar’s November Pivot

Coming off a classic baseball postseason that was capped by an amazing World Series, it’s time for sports fans to make the pivot into November and we’ll be doing the same here at TheSportsNotebook. NFL teams are jousting for position to set themselves up for the stretch drive. College football is in the stretch drive. We’ve still got awards to settle in baseball and a new season is here in college basketball. The beauty of the sports calendar is that while some months are more intense than others, it truly never sleeps.

Here’s a look at the month ahead in this space in chronological sequence:

COLLEGE FOOTBALL TAKES CENTER STAGE

The race for the College Football Playoff will be a key storyline throughout this month, The first official rankings from the Selection Committee will be released this Tuesday night (8 PM ET, ESPN) and will continue weekly until the final 12-team bracket is released on Sunday, December 7.

Later this week, we’ll have reaction to the initial rankings along with evaluations and assessments on what to look for as we build to a crescendo for December.

BASEBALL TAKES A CURTAIN CALL

Major League Baseball will have its epilogue on Thursday, November 13, with their awards shows from Las Vegas (9 PM ET, MLB). While Gold Gloves and other awards are already being announced, this November 13 ceremony will focus on the big ones, the MVP and Cy Young Award in both leagues. Voting took place immediately after the regular season and right before the postseason and has been under wraps.

We already published our selections both the AL and NL and we’ll be back here in this space with reactions to the official winners. We’ll also take a look at the key free agent storylines that will shape the offseason before we put baseball talk to bed for the winter.

TIP OFF TIME IN COLLEGE HOOPS

College basketball starts tonight with a marquee game between defending national champion Florida and Arizona (7 PM ET, TNT). This will be a part of a handful of interesting one-off non-conference games throughout the month. The first real major event will be the Player’s Era Festival in Las Vegas from Nov 23-25 (the three days leading up to Thanksgiving), which will be followed by the ACC/SEC Challenge in the early days of December.

At some point in the week leading up to the Player’s Era Festival, an 18-team event with eight squads ranked in the preseason top 25, we’ll do a general overview of the national landscape in college hoops, with the goal of getting oriented to a new season as we begin the long road to March.

THE NFL THUNDERS ON

It’s last in the chronology, but first on our minds and that’s the NFL season. Here at TheSportsNotebook we break the 18-week regular season into six-week blocks for evaluation purposes. In mid-October, we published our first check-ins on each division (you can scroll down the blog for the eight different posts). The second check-in, following Week 12, will take place just prior to Thanksgiving. Turkey Day is a fitting way to signal that the stretch drive has arrived, and we’ll have evaluations of both the AFC and NFC landscape over the two days prior to Thanksgiving.

MAKING THE PIVOT

November is a pivot month for us on the sports calendar, coming out of the cauldron of October and looking forward to the drama of football postseasons in the dead of winter. Join us as we make the pivot. And explore the archives here on the top menu bars, with the great heritage of American sports’ modern era, going back to the late 1960s/early 1970s, is preserved. We’ll see you later this week for some college football talk.