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For the last two months, we’ve been dying for some National Football League action. While we will get just that during next week’s NFL Draft, there is an appetizer to that entree, as the 2017 NFL schedule was released yesterday and even though we are five months away, fans are excited.

The NFL season kicks off Thursday, September 7th with the defending Super Bowl champion New England Patriots playing host to the Kansas City Chiefs. The opener isn’t the only game scheduled for Thursday this year, as the NFL Network and CBS, along with Amazon, have again teamed up to broadcast 18 games in 2017.

Monday Night Football returns on ESPN, with John Gruden and Sean McDonough calling the action for a second-straight year. Sunday Night Football also returns, on NBC, to give fans three primetime slots throughout the week.

The 17-week schedule release for all 32 NFL teams may not be news, per say, but the predictions have already started to fly in.

ESPN is predicting that the reigning Super Bowl champions will go 13-3 and win the AFC East, while last year’s runners up, the Atlanta Falcons, are projected to go 11-5. The only team I care about, the New York Giants, are slotted in at 10-6, which basically means that they could go 12-4 and win the NFC East, or stumble and never recover before finishing 7-9.

Regardless of how the Giants or the rest of the NFL fares, every team starts the season undefeated and with some sort of hope that this their time. This year, that hope starts five months before the season actually starts, which means the Cleveland Browns have a lot of faking it to do before September.