The Greatest Weekend in Sports

As much as I follow, cover, and enthuse about sports year-round, there are two times of the year that I look forward to especially.

One is March Madness. Others might take off the Thursday and Friday that make up the first round of the NCAA tournament. I always took it one step further, and took off the entire week prior, when the conference tournaments are in full-bore.

The second time is right around the corner, and I'm giddy with excitement: Labor Day weekend. I love Labor Day weekend so much simply because that's when the greatest glut of sports, important sports, is being played. Let me count the ways.

First, and most importantly, it's the opening weekend of college football. If you've been reading this space, you know how I long for college football all offseason, and do a ridiculously early annual preview of Week 1 games.

The distinction of this year's very-very-very first game goes to Murray State at Louisville, at 6 PM Eastern on ESPNU on Thursday September 1st. It may not be as much of a clunker as you would think. Louisville is picked at or near the bottom in most Big East polls I've seen, and Murray State is coming off a solid year in Division 1-AA (I continue to boycott the phrase "FCS"), and has an explosive stat machine of a quarterback, Casey Brockman.

As for the first "real" game ... well, ESPN normally features a solid ACC vs. SEC (or even SEC vs. SEC) matchup for the first night of the season, but they've downgraded this year to UNLV at Wisconsin. Honestly, the closest game that features two Division 1-A teams on Thursday is only on espn3.com: Wake Forest at Syracuse.

Friday's better, with TCU traveling to Baylor. Saturday's slate pits my two beloved colleges against each other, Akron at Ohio State. The two marquee games on Saturday (to the complaint of many across the Internet) are both on at the same time: Boise State vs. Georgia in Atlanta, and Oregon vs. LSU in Dallas. Those games are at 8 PM Eastern, and there is still another one at that time that should be good. Tulsa, fresh off a Conference USA West co-championship and holders of a 7-game win streak, have to test their mettle at Oklahoma. It will be the first game ever broadcast on the FX network.

Sunday has Marshall at West Virginia for the in-state crown, and a better intra-state game will be Sunday Night when SMU travels to Texas A&M. I will be at that game. Expect a trip report.

Labor Day Night usually features Miami, and will again this year, when they travel to Maryland.

Finally on the football front, there's a full slate of CFL games on espn3.com, and it's the last week of the NFL preseason. Last chance to make a decent impression, you marginal players you!

It's also a huge, huge week for soccer. The first weekend in September is annually a "FIFA match date," which means all clubs must permit their players to leave for international duty. On Friday, big matches abound.

First, the U.S. plays Costa Rica in a fairly important game. While Jurgen Klinsmann had a nice debut coaching the Americans, drawing with the Mexicans, if he loses to an inferior Costa Rican team, the honeymoon will be over like that.

But over in Europe, qualifying for Euro 2012 is in its home stretch. Two of the three teams tied for first in Group B, Ireland and Slovakia, will be playing each other. Hungary needs to make up 3 points on Sweden to get into second place in Group E (the top two slots in each group being the critical ones), and they host the Swedes. Greece travels to Israel in a 1-vs.-2 (well, tied for second) Group F battle. These are just a few of the crucial Euro 2012 qualifying matches.

But I bet you didn't know 2014 World Cup qualifying is underway, too. Indeed it is, and there are qualifying matches taking place in North America and Asia. While it is too early for USA and the other giants of CONCACAF to begin their campaign, the format is different in Asia, where Japan and North Korea will square off, two squads that played in the 2010 World Cup.

All the soccer matches I mentioned take place on Friday.

Baseball is kicking into, to quote H.I. McDonough in Raising Arizona, the heat of the pee-nant drive. The notable series that week, in terms of teams still in contention and battling it out with each other, are the White Sox at the Tigers, the Rangers at the Red Sox, and the Diamondbacks at the Giants.

All of that would be more than enough. But wait! There's more! You'd think the Powers That Be in tennis would think twice about scheduling a major on this weekend, but the U.S. Open will be in full swing that weekend and, being a major, I will try to squeeze some viewing in. ESPN3.com will be showing several courts at once, although not (going by their schedule) on Saturday and Sunday, when CBS will be going wall-to-wall from 11 to 6 Eastern.

If you're a basketball fan, the time is now to get your fix in since the NBA season is likely to be wiped out and the college game doesn't start until mid-November. Happily, the two strongest confederations — Europe and the Americas — will both be in the midst of their championship tournament, and besides continental/hemispherical bragging rights, the tournaments double as qualifiers for the 2012 Summer Olympics.

Alas, the U.S. is not taking part in the FIBA Americas championship, having already qualified for the Olympics. Every other team will be there, and the best game of the weekend will likely be Puerto Rico vs. Argentina on Friday. They are the two highest ranked FIBA Americas members besides the U.S.

As far as the European Championships, or Eurobasket as its called, there's too many "good" games to go over, as 11 of the top 20 teams in the FIBA rankings are European. I will just point out that three of the top six ranked teams in the world (Spain second, Lithuania fifth, Turkey sixth) are in Group A, and they all play one another that weekend at some point. It will be a tough road for the other poor saps in Group A (Great Britain, Poland, and a to-be-determined late qualifier).

The best part: Every game of both the FIBA Americas Championship and Eurobasket will be on espn3.com. I apologize for sounding like a shill for espn3, but they just have a great selection of obscure but very watchable competitions.

In golf, the Deutsche Bank Classic will take place, and take advantage of the U.S. holiday schedule to run Friday-Monday instead of Thursday-Sunday. The Nationwide Tour's Mylan Classic will be on the Golf Channel, as well. The biggest golf tournament of the weekend, though, is probably the European Open, a semi-major on the European Tour that is also open to members of the Asian tour. It is held, as always, in the interestingly-named resort of Crans-Montana, in Switzerland.

What's amusing to me is that, if I were an Australian or a New Zealander, I could also write about what a big weekend this is if I only cared about their sports; three of the four biggest Australasian sporting competitions — the National Rugby League, the Australian Football League, and the ITM Cup, which is New Zealand's rugby union association — all either have their final weekend of the regular season, or their championship. I'm sure you can find it online. Sadly, for me, I will have to sleep sometime.

So can we fast-forward a couple of weeks yet?