Wall-to-Wall M.L.S. on NBC - NYTimes.com This weekend's slate of nine games in Major League Soccer is being called several things: Rivalry Day, the Breakaway, or maybe (a stretch perhaps) the GoalZone (with a bow at the waist to the N.F.L."s RedZone channel). Whatever you choose to call it, the league and NBC, one of its television partners (ESPN and Univision are the others), will provide 10 hours of wall-to-wall soccer coverage that will begin in Harrison, N.J., with the East Coast rivalry game between visiting D.C. United and the Red Bulls, scheduled to kick off a little after 12:30 p.m. (all times Eastern). The game will be carried nationally on the main NBC network, except in the New York metropolitan area where the St. Patrick's Day parade takes over the local station, Channel 4, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. The soccer match will be available on TV on the NBC Sports Network, Cozi-TV (available on most cable systems), ESPN Deportes; and online at NBCSports.com and the NBC Sports Live Extra smartphone and tablet app. After the D.C.-Red Bulls game, coverage will slide over to NBCSN for the rest of the day, until about 10:30 p.m. First labels first. A key element for M.L.S. is the focus on its first weekend of games that features the league's best rivalries. Part of that is an expected record turnout of traveling fans: approximately 6,350 in all. Kansas City expects about 200 fans to travel to Chicago for the 3 p.m. kickoff on NBCSN. Nearly 4,000 are expected to travel from Toronto to Montreal for Canada's intra-province match at Olympic Stadium, which starts at 4 p.m. on Canada's national TSN channel (the third Canadian club in the league, Vancouver, is off this weekend because M.L.S. usually has at least one on the shelf because there are an an odd number of teams -19). No organized groups of fans, the league said, are traveling from Philadelphia to New England for the 5 p.m. match between the Union and the Revolution on Univision Deportes, though Philly fans usually hit the road for "local" games. The Columbus-San Jose game (5:30 p.m. start) in California is neither a rivalry game nor one conducive to fans traveling. The Rocky Mountain matchup of Colorado at Real Salt Lake starts at 6 p.m. (about 200 Rapids fans are expected to make the trip). And the evening concludes with the Cascadia Cup match at CenturyLink Field between Portland and Seattle, at 8 p.m. on NBCSN, with about 1,000 Timbers fans making the journey. Only the Columbus-San Jose and Salt Lake-Colorado games will not be televised nationally in the United States. But those two, and the other five matches, are available on MLS Live, the league's smartphone and tablet app. The weekend schedule wraps up on Sunday with the Texas matchup between Dallas and Houston (1 p.m. on ESPN2) at BBVA Compass Stadium followed by the Superclasico between Chivas USA and the Los Angeles Galaxy (5 p.m. on UniMas). For NBC's part, the network will provide 10 hours of game coverage and look-ins, what the league and network are calling a Whip-Around, on Saturday. From Red Bull Arena, Arlo White and Kyle Martino will call the game, then skedaddle to studios in Stamford, Conn., where they will join with Russ Thaler. The effort is being compared to the N.F.L."s RedZone channel, that zips viewers among Sunday games with an emphasis on scoring plays (commercial-free). The RedZone channel in turn is modeled after a similar around-the-horn presentation of games in Serie A by Italy's RAI network. "We're very excited by this weekend," Nelson Rodriguez, the league's executive vice president for competition and game operations, told SI.com. We'd gathered members of various departments across the league office to talk about ways we could continue to innovate our league season schedule and see if we could create touchpoints along the way that would spark interest. What do you think of the idea of staggering games across a single day? Unlike the N.F.L., a paucity of scoring in soccer does not lend itself to a full RedZone-type treatment, but do you think NBC's concept has some promise? Finally, is this a good idea?