The magazine was first published by Gannett as
USA Today Baseball Weekly, formatted as a
tabloid-sized publication focusing exclusively on baseball coverage that launched on April 5, 1991, in concert with the first week of regular season play for that year's
Major League Baseball season. For its first ten years of publication, it was released on a weekly basis during the baseball season and bi-weekly during the off-season. The publication was renamed
USA Today Sports Weekly on September 4, 2002, preceding the official start of the
2002 NFL season, when it began to incorporate stories and statistics about the NFL. The editorial operations of
Sports Weekly originally operated autonomously from those managed by the sports department of
USA Today, before being integrated with its parent newspaper's sports unit in late 2005.
Sports Weekly added coverage and interviews from the
NASCAR circuit beginning with the February 15, 2006 issue. However this lasted only for the
auto racing organization's 2006 racing season, with Gannett announcing it was dropping weekly coverage of NASCAR from
Sports Weekly after one season after the November 22, 2006 issue of the publication; although it would continue to issue three special editions dedicated to NASCAR on an annual basis. For the 2007 professional and collegiate baseball season,
USA Today Sports Weekly announced that it would incorporate more comprehensive baseball coverage, along with the return of college baseball features; beginning with the August 8 issue that year, the magazine also added weekly coverage of the NCAA college football season. == For The Win ==