Proposing a New NFL Thanksgiving Tradition
By Lucas Mitzel
Stateside, Thanksgiving Day is one of America’s favorite holidays. By and large it’s due to the food and the gathering of families and friends. The other major cited reason for loving the holiday is the football. Some families play a game together on the holiday, while some of them and many others enjoy watching the games on TV either before or after dinner.
This last tradition is something I love, and really the NFL has cornered the sports market on Thanksgiving like the NBA has with Christmas Day and college football has with New Years Day. I think the NFL can do more to really corner the market on the holiday however.
The Thanksgiving Day game tradition goes all the way back to 1934 when then-Lions owner G.A. Richards wanted to drum up support for his team that he had just moved to Detroit. They were very good that year and were approaching the end of the season with a date against the undefeated Chicago Bears coming up. Richards convinced radio executives to carry the game nationwide and got a surge in attendance from that first game, and a tradition was born that, other than an interruption during World War II, has continued every year. The Dallas Cowboys decided to try a similar strategy in 1966 with similar levels of success, and the two teams have continued to host Thanksgiving Day games. The NFL added a third game in 2006 because why not have more football on a holiday?
I like the idea of tradition and keeping games that have been going on for a long time, but “That’s the way we’ve always done it!” isn’t really a valid reason to continue to do something. My thought: the NFL should slightly tweak the schedule and rotate all three games to truly make Thanksgiving Day their showcase.
Look at how the NBA does their Christmas schedule. This year we have an NBA Finals rematch, a battle between Derrick Rose If He Stays Healthy and Kevin Durant If He Stays Healthy, Anthony Davis against Chris Bosh, a Battle of Los Angeles, and a rivalry game between the Spurs and Rockets. In the past, matchups between Kobe’s Lakers and LeBron’s Cavaliers were on the docket, and Michael Jordan’s Bulls played on Christmas multiple times. The NBA knows what it’s doing when it comes to Christmas scheduling.
The NFL can do something fairly similar. You won’t always be able to do a Super Bowl rematch because of the league’s schedule rotation, but there are so many rivalry games or games of playoff significance that the NFL can set up premier matchups on Thanksgiving with the balance of power up for grabs or highlight the league’s best rivalries. I love that the NFL decided to put Bears and Packers as the Thanksgiving night game this year, and the Packers took advantage by deciding to retire Brett Favre’s number during halftime of that game.
It would require some tinkering to some degree. I believe the NFL should institute a bye week for the teams playing on a Thursday night every week to eliminate the short week of preparation, as this would likely help with injuries to some degree as well as the general fatigue level that comes with playing such a physical, draining sport. It also allows coaches to have a few extra days to game plan, setting up potential chess matches between great coaches while banged up players have those few extra days to heal and be ready to go for a primetime showdown.
One of the biggest drawbacks I could see with this would be the blowback from Lions and Cowboys fans with the “corporate takeover of their tradition” or something like that, never mind the fact that the whole reason for the tradition coming into existence in the first place was based on corporate profits. We can argue records; the Cowboys are 29–17–1 all time on Thanksgiving, which is a very good record, but they’ve lost three of their last five Thanksgiving Day games. The Lions are a little worse, going 35–38–2, though they have a recent ten-year losing streak that brought their record down. For a long time, the Detroit tradition was the Lions losing a home game, while the Cowboys have had some struggles for short stretches. That said, I have no problem with the Lions and Cowboys hosting once in a while as something of a throwback to the tradition. I just don’t see why they should have the monopoly other than the fact that that’s the way we’ve always done it.
This is a chance for the NFL to take a step closer to what other sports do with major holidays. Have the league or the teams fly out the players’ families of the participating teams to wherever they’re playing, and have a big feast after the game (or before, in the case of the night game) and that way we can have the best of both worlds. Fans can spend time with their families while watching football, and the players who play the game can play in front of their families and still get to celebrate the holiday with theirs in the same manner. After all, isn’t that what Thanksgiving is all about?