2013 Official Fire Schedule

-Upon first look, the balance of home and away games seems to be spread out pretty evenly. There isn't any long stretches of home or away games at one time, and that's fine with me. While it's always nice to have a long stretch of home games, it's hell when you have to pay it back with a tough road trip.

-Another thing I noticed is that there are only 3 Wednesday games this year. Midweek games are always a tougher draw, for obvious reasons. One, the crowd is much smaller. Two, it's tough when you have a weekend game, a midweek game, and then another weekend game all with 7 or 8 days. This is even worse when you have injury issues or need to rotate players for proper rest. I never have liked midweek games so it's nice to see them minimized this season.

-Going off the same idea as midweek games, it is encouraging to see a lot of evening games too. Early afternoon games have their advantages too, but I think most of us prefer evening affairs. Again, the crowd is better, and in the dead heat of summer, I would rather play soccer at 7 PM rather than 1 PM. Plus the later starts also help with more national viewings as well. By my count, between ESPN2 and NBC Sports, we have 10 prime time games. Although a chunk of these are earlier games, it's good to see the Fire having so many games in front of a national audience. This should get some nice exposure for a team that regularly flies under the radar in the eyes of most of the national media.

-We get some good early season action in the East in April with back to back matches against Houston and Columbus. The Houston match should be intense as we will be looking to get some revenge for our playoff exit at their hands last season. And Columbus is, well Columbus. We all get to point, laugh, and make fun of their yellow uniforms. And then we get to beat them. Rinse, repeat.

-July will be a tough stretch with San Jose, Kansas City, Vancouver, DC and Houston all back to back. This could be a very important stretch for the team depending on where we sit heading into that portion of the schedule. We definitely need players to be healthy as this will be a very tough, physical stretch. Upon first glance, to me this could be the biggest stretch for the Men in Red in terms of toughness. I am marking July down already as a key month.

-We only get Seattle once this year, and it's there in Seattle (of course). We still need to get that Seattle monkey off our back, so when we win it will be that much sweeter to do it in their (borrowed) house. Unfortunately I don't think they will have learned what real grass is by then.

Feel free to weigh in with your own thoughts in the comments section.