The 2013 NFL season finally gets underway tonight, with the cornerstone of Thursday’s daily sports agenda being the battle in the Rocky Mountains. The Baltimore Ravens meet the Denver Broncos in a rematch of last year’s epic second-round playoff game to start the year. Kickoff is at 8:30 PM ET on NBC.
The college football Week 2 schedule is highlighted by an ESPN tripleheader that includes all three contenders in the SEC East. The action starts with Florida-Miami, rolls on with South Carolina-Georgia and concludes with Notre Dame-Michigan. TheSportsNotebook’s college football coverage looks at all three games…
There are four games in NFL Week 1 that the nation will see, starting in the late afternoon window on Sunday afternoon and rolling through the now-traditional Monday Night Football doubleheader on ESPN. TheSportsNotebook’s NFL analysis concludes it’s Week 1 coverage with a look at the four money games…
All of the games are predicted on the moneyline, which unlike the pointspread is simply about winning outright. If a team is (-300) as the favorite, it means you’re required to wager $300 to turn a $100 profit. If an underdog is (+220), a simple $100 bet gets you a profit of $200. Each team’s moneyline is in parentheses, and the road team is always listed first.
We’re back at the scene of the crime, so to speak, for the opening of the 2013 NFL season. The Baltimore Ravens visit the Denver Broncos on Thursday night to kick off the year in an 8:30 PM ET kickoff on NBC.
The last time these two teams faced was the second round of last year’s playoffs, which had about as stunning an end to regulation as we’ll ever see, when Denver free safety Rahim Moore allowed Baltimore receiver Jacoby Jones to get behind him for a 70-yard touchdown catch that tied the game 35-35, and ultimately allowed the Ravens to win in overtime.
ESPN’s MLB coverage is getting locked in for the playoff drive, as the network will show a rare Wednesday night doubleheader tonight, with fans watching both ends of the race for the AL East title in today’s daily sports TV docket.
TheSportsNotebook’s NFL analysis has been going full-bore through the month of August, completing previews on all 32 teams individually, as well as a separate overview on each of the eight divisions, exploring their betting odds, recent history and including links to the team previews of its members. Now it’s time to tie everything together into one last preseason preview.
TheSportsNotebook’s college football coverage will have our BCS bowl projections after each week throughout the regular season. I prefer this methodology of tracking the top teams over and above rankings, because the latter tells us nothing about the matchups we’ll actually be watching in December and January.
There are, as you might expect, minimal changes in these projections, from what I had to start the season. The one change comes in the at-large area.
College football’s top rung is currently held down by Alabama and will be until they lose outright, rather than just look sluggish. That’ s appropriate for a program that has won three of the last four national championships, but there’s also no denying that the Tide looked like a team with a lot of work to do in their 35-10 win over Virginia Tech.
There were a lot of things one could take away from Week 1 in the college football season, a five-day festival that begin with South Carolina’s 27-10 Thursday win over North Carolina and Jadeveon Clowney sucking wind all over the field, and ended with Florida State’s 41-13 prime-time thrashing of Pitt on Labor Day. But the biggest is this—any notions the challengers in the ACC Atlantic Division had of getting to Charlotte and the conference championship game on December 7 had best be put on hold.
The Detroit Tigers and Boston Red Sox each have some cushion in their respective division races, but the early part of this week presents an opportunity for some challenger, be it Cleveland or Tampa Bay, because the Tigers and Sox are going head-to-head. And the second game of their three-game set from Fenway Park is the highlight of Tuesday’s daily sports docket (7 PM ET, MLB).
The Tampa Bay Rays have hit a bump on the road. After a tough week, capped off by three straight losses in Oakland, the Rays are now closer to the playoff bubble than they are to first place in the AL East. TheSportsNotebook’s MLB coverage will take a brief look back at what’s gone wrong.
