The Buffalo Bills were the first NFL team to open training this year.  They are playing in the Hall of Fame Game against the New York Giants on Sunday, August 3rd at Fawcett Stadium in Canton, OH.

 vs. 

The Training Camp schedule for the Buffalo Bills can be found here.  Here is the Training Camp schedule for the New York Giants.

Why the Bills vs. the Giants?

I was reading an article on The MMQB with Peter King, who is a voter for the NFL Hall of Fame.  He explains it best while answering a question from one of his readers:

ON THE HALL OF FAME GAME. How does the league pick the teams for the Hall Of Fame game?  While the players might not enjoy the extra game and week of training camp, I’d suspect there are plenty of coaches who would welcome the extra time.

—John Hayes

John, the NFL and the Hall of Fame try to put teams in the game based on inductees that season. For instance, this year, the Giants (Michael Strahan) and Bills (Andre Reed) are playing. The Hall figures that many fans going to Canton to see their heroes likely will want to watch the first game of the preseason too.

Hall of Fame Enshrinement

There is a whole weekend of events scheduled around the enshrinement of this year’s inductees:

• Michael Strahan
• Andre Reed
• Walter Jones
• Derrick Brooks
• Aeneas Williams
• Claude Humphrey
• Ray Guy

The events include:

• Photo ops with past and present Hall of Famers
• Enshrinee’s Gold Jacket Dinner
• Legends Club VIP Tailgate Party
• Enshrinement Ceremony

For more information and details on purchasing tickets, check out the festival schedule.

Hall of Fame Game tickets

Tickets are still available for the Hall of Fame Game in the range of $54 to $74 plus ticket fees.  Tickets can be purchased online here.

If you’re going to buy tickets to the game, you should represent the Buffalo Bills by using your team credit card.

or, if you’re a New York Giants fan, show your team spirit with their credit card.

Flying to the game

The Hall of Fame Game is in Canton, OH, which is about an hour south of Cleveland, 2 hours west of Pittsburgh, or about 2 hours north east of Columbus.

There are plenty of options to fly to one of these cities, but you’ll need to rent a car to drive the remaining distance.

On Expedia, the flights were pretty expensive at almost $800 from LAX to CLE

On Southwest, the flights were a little less than $600

or you could have used 34,642 points at $11.20.

Using American Airlines miles, you could book Economy Class tickets for 60,000 miles because no “Saver” space was available.

Or you could splurge an upgrade to Business Class for 50,000 points… a savings of 10,000 miles… because Saver space is available in Business Class.

Conclusion

Attending the NFL Hall of Fame Enshrinement Ceremony is definitely on my sports bucket list.  The speeches are often very emotional and endearing, while it is great to see fans of all teams support these worthwhile inductees.  I’m looking forward to attending in the future and taking a tour of the NFL Hall of Fame.