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, starting 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. It’s gotten worse in 2008. The base price for the package is $299, and if you want games in high def, it’s an additional $99, as they’re in the “Superfan” addon for the package. That’s $400 friggin dollars for the season. SCREW THAT!

Anyway, for the last several seasons (08 is my seventh, 02 was the first), 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 Thursday 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:

• In the past years I’ve done this document, I’ve used the DirecTV NFL Sunday Ticket schedule as a source. I’d then have to flesh it out with addtl info on NBC & NFL Network games. This year, those games are listed in the DirecTV schedule. However, there were several games that were in conflict with the schedule at nfl.com. Specifically, I’m talking about mostly non Sunday games. When there was a conflict, I went with the nfl.com schedule.
• There are a few games this year that DirecTV’s schedule list as TBA. These are in Week 16 & 17. The Week 16 game is listed as being on Channel 716 with TBD@TBD. This is impossible, as there are already 16 games scheduled that week, so I have ignored that listing. On Week 17, they appear to have all 16 games being played on Sunday, and the standard layout of NFLST channels is not enough to carry them all. Two games are listed as late games, but without a channel assignment (SEA@ARI & WAS@SF). I’ve made note of this on the Week 17 notes line.
• In the past, DirecTV has never published their HD schedule until generally the week before any given Sunday. This year, there is a listed schedule for HDTV games, but they’re the sAME channels as the SD versions, which is impossible. In 2007, the HD games were on channels 719-733. One would think they’d be there again, but there’s no concrete proof of this.
• This spreadsheet was created with Microsoft Excel 2007. Just noting that in case you have an old version of Office or something that needs a specific requirement from the program creating the spreadsheet. I’ve saved it in an older format (Excel 97-2003), but you never know.
• Weeks 11 through 17 are part of “Flex Scheduling”. Being tired of getting stuck with dud games on TV at the end of the season, the NFL now has an adjustable schedule for the Sunday night NBC broadcasts. In 2006 (the first year) it was “open” with a game being moved, but in 2007 (and now 2008), they have a defined game for Sunday night. Weeks 11-17 though could have the Sunday night game switch with something else. The NFL site has some details on the 2007 version of Flex Scheduling online at the link here (I have not seen an update yet for 2008).
• I also have this available as a spreadsheet in Google Spreadsheets. If you would like to have access to my online version, you can visit it at the link below. The only problem there is that the Google Spreadsheets version doesn’t properly translate all of the notes I have. It’s there if you want to check it out, 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.
If you find any errors, please let me know.