The NFL will release the 2013 Regular Season schedules to the public on Thursday at 8 p.m. Eastern Time.
The schedule’s planned release had been tentatively scheduled for Tuesday night, but the league confirmed on Monday that the announcement would be delayed.
As of right now, fans know who their team’s opponents are. At the end of the regular season, the NFL announces the upcoming opponents for the following season. As is typical, teams play their divisional opponents both home and away, and will split home and away contests with two other divisions from both the AFC and NFC.
What fans don’t know is how the league fine-tunes the schedule to ensure marquee matchups on prime-time games, avoiding long road trips for shortened weeks, and keeping players safe with weather, in particularly heat. Additional factors like Monday Night Football, Sunday Night Football, Thursday Night Football, and holiday games are taken into accounts. For example, New York teams are scheduled to avoid conflict with Jewish holidays, and the Lions and Cowboys always play on Thanksgiving.
With the hard part out of the way, fans can now start marking their calendars with big games, and start planning which games to buy tickets to. It also means those fantasy football fanatics can begin analyzing the match-ups.
