Since I live in Dallas, and have the hell of living in Cowboy land, one majorly huge lifeline for me is the NFL Sunday Ticket package on DirecTV. It allows me to watch pretty much whatever game I want, so I get to see all the Eagles games (I’m from Philly), and Steeler games (wife’s from Pittsburgh) without having to sit through the agony of all the Dallas Cowboy games every week.

That’s been my intro text since I’ve been doing these updates, but unfortunately in 2007 I have had to drop Sunday Ticket, mostly due to cost. In the last year and a half, I’ve taken a larger, more active role in my church, and due to that, I ended up missing a lot of Sunday ticket games in 2006. I am likely going to be doing the same events this year, and due to the overall cost of Ticket, I decided to drop it if I was going to be missing a lot of the games. I didn’t want to do that, and if it wasn’t so darned expensive, I wouldn’t, but there you are. :)

Anyway, for the last several seasons (07 is my seventh doing this I believe), I’ve put together a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet containing the entire NFL Season Schedule for all the NFL Sunday Ticket channels. You can download it, print it, and have the entire schedule on one page. This originally started out as a project for some people on the TiVo community forums, but I’ve moved to my own blog as my primary distribution point. Still, I wanted to say hi to the folks over there, even if it’s not a regular hangout anymore.

The first year I did this I did just the NFLST games. But since then I include everything else. Which lately has gotten a lot more confusing. My schedule also covers the ESPN MNF games, the Sunday night NBC games, various Thurdsay NFL Network games, and the other oddities like Thanksgiving day, things like that. They’re all here. Here’s a few notes about the spreadsheet and the NFL schedule this season:

• For the last several years, DirecTV has not published the HD schedule until generally the week of, so that makes it impossible to schedule early like this. If DirecTV ever would publish their full season HD schedule ahead of time, I’d add that. If it changes, I’ll update, but I’m not holding my breath. You shouldn’t, either.
• Weeks 11-17 are now part of the new “Flex Scheduling”. Being tired of getting stuck with dud games on TV at the end of the season, the NFL has implemented this policy. The NFL will move one game from the schedule to the Sunday night slot no closer than 12 days from gameday. Lots of details on the new flex scheduling are available on the NFL.com website here. I suggest reading it. Those notes are about the 2006 season, I’ve yet to see a note about the 07 flex scheduling.
• Two years ago, someone had a great idea – to color code the boxes for an individual team’s games with their team colors. I think it’s a great idea, but that’s 32 extra spreadsheets for me to do. Great idea, but I don’t have the time to make that many spreadsheets. :)
• I also have this available as a spreadsheet in Google Spreadsheets. If you would like to have access to my online version, you can reach it online here. The online version has a few display oddities in some of the notes, though.

If you use this, send me an email and let me know. I don’t want anything, I just like to know that people actually use the thing. Feel free to pass this to whomever you want, just please don’t change the credits; distribute it as I sent it. That’s all I ask.

Thanks to Richard for being my proofreader this year.

If you find any errors, please let me know.