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.
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.
There are six games on the NFL Week 1 schedule that will draw national coverage, excepting in cases where the local team is playing in the same time slot. We’ve already previewed the nine undercard games. Here, TheSportsNotebook will focus on the core six games, which include the now-traditional Monday Night Football doubleheader to open the season
The NFL season kicks off tonight, and with it TheSportsNotebook’s weekly game previews begin. The format for previewing each week will be as follows—We’ll start with an opening preview of the midweek game (normally Thursday nights) and include the undercard games of Sunday, which will be defined as those just being shown to the local market. Then on Friday we’ll come back with a preview of the nationally televised games, the four on Sunday (two early, one late, one prime-time) and Monday night. Here we go with NFL Week 1…