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.

Anyway, for the last several seasons (06 is my fifth 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. :)

The first year I did this I did just the NFLST games. But since then I include everything else. Which in 2006 is a lot more confusing. I also have 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 two years, DirecTV did not publish the HD schedule until generally the week of, so that makes it impossible to schedule. If DirecTV ever would publish their full season HD schedule ahead of time, I’d add that, but it’s been this way for the last couple of seasons. If it changes for 2006, I’ll update, but I’m not holding my breath.
• Monday Night Football moved from ABC to ESPN this season.
• The Sunday night games that were on ESPN now have moved to NBC. ABC is out, they have no games at all now.
• Weeks 10-15 & 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 now has a rather large number of games listed as early games these weeks. 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.
• I’ve been doing this spreadsheet for about 5 seasons now, and the more stuff they add like flex scheduling, Thursday games, etc, the more cluttered my spreadsheet goes. If it gets worse next season, I may have to revisit how I lay this out.
• Last year 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. :)

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.
Thank you, and enjoy!

A couple of updates since I originally posted this:

• Update Jul 25: Week 3 had an incorrect opponent for the Rams. It said Panters, should ahve been Cardinals. Fixed. Thanks BrianT.
• Update Jul 31: Two NYJ/NYG mixups. Week 7’s MNF game and Week 11’s Ch 714 game. Thanks to gruxx.
• Update Sep 4: Another NYJ/NYG mixup. Week 11’s MNF football game. Fixed. Thanks to Kevin in FL.
• Update Sep 4 #2: I finally found the time to go through the spreadsheet and remove all the hyperlinks in the games. For example, DAL@PHI was being translated into an email link. These are all gone now.

If you find any errors, please let me know.