Daily Sports: NFL Week 1 With A Baseball Complement

The first Sunday of the 2013 NFL season is here, with its standard run of an early afternoon where most people watch their local teams, a marquee late afternoon game and then a prime-time battle setting the agenda. The powers of the NFC are the focus today, and the daily sports card is ably filled out with big baseball games both early and late.

CBS has the best NFL game in the early window, when the Cincinnati Bengals visit the Chicago Bears in the 1 PM ET window, a game available almost anywhere in the country, at least where AFC teams aren’t the home market. Fox’s coverage is more split, with Minnesota-Detroit in the north and Atlanta-New Orleans in the south.

TBS is hoping you don’t forget about their baseball coverage, which carried so many Sunday afternoons throughout the summer. And they have a matchup people can remember, with the finale of the Red Sox-Yankees, in a 1 PM ET telecast from the Bronx.

The late afternoon is turned over to Fox, and the Joe Buck/Troy Aikman broadcast team. When the Green Bay Packers ended the 2012 season, they were seen futilely chasing San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick all over the field in a second-round playoff game. The Packers return to the scene of the crime on Sunday, with a 4:25 PM ET kickoff in Frisco.

Two more NFC contenders are showcased on Sunday Night Football. The Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants each faded last year to miss the playoffs, and each are hungry to get back on the field. They’ll kick it off at 8:30 PM ET on NBC.

ESPN’s Sunday Night Baseball coverage has a good game in its own right, with the Los Angeles Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds. The Dodgers are cruising into the playoffs, and the Reds look to be doing the same.

TheSportsNotebook previews all four major national TV games of Week 1, including today’s Packers-49ers and Giants-Cowboys game, and adding tomorrow’s Monday Night doubleheader. We’ve also got coverage of the 12 games on the Week 1 undercard.