Daily Sports: Thursday’s East Coast MLB-NFL Focus

It will come as no surprise to anyone that the big markets of the East Coast are in the spotlight for Thursday’s daily sports. Whether it’s the NFL or major league baseball, New York is prominent, Boston is heavily involved, and you throw Baltimore in the mix as well.

The baseball playoff race focus will be the same as it was on Tuesday, with a focus on the two head-to-head showdowns going on in the AL East. The series finales for Boston-Tampa Bay, and NY Yanks-Baltimore each take place at 7 PM ET and MLB Network will show one of the two games to the country.

Then in the NFL, it’s more New York-Boston. This time it’s the Patriots-Jets in an 8:25 PM ET kickoff on the NFL Network. Geno Smith had a nice start to his career as Jets’ quarterback, but a prime-time road game in Foxboro is a little different than an early afternoon home game with Tampa Bay.

If you’re one of the fans in flyover country that’s tired of the media’s focus on the northeast corridor of I-95, then college football comes to the rescue. ESPN has TCU-Texas Tech at 7:30 PM ET, a game between a pair of Big 12 teams with bowl aspirations. And you have to be a hard-core college football fan to appreciate this next game, but the Troy-Arkansas State game (7:30 PM ET, ESPNU) is likely to be significant in this year’s Sun Belt race.

TheSportsNotebook was busy on football yesterday, and NFL analysis was updated to feature the four showcase games of Week 2, including tonight’s Jets-Patriots battle. College football coverage honed in on the three marquee games of Saturday. The biggest is Alabama-Texas A&M, and don’t overlook UCLA-Nebraska and Wisconsin-Arizona State.

More football coverage will come today. Between Thursday and Friday, we’ll be adding coverage of the undercard games in both college and the NFL. And lest you think we’ve forgotten MLB coverage, that was updated on Monday and will be again on Friday.