To assure Thanksgiving Dinner could not be served without a National Football League game playing, the league added a third game for the holiday in 2006. Since the inception of the NFL in 1920, the League has played football on this holiday. The Detroit Lions began the tradition of hosting a Thanksgiving game in 1934, the Dallas Cowboys began their streak of entertaining a visitor on this day in 1966.
Cowboys General Manager Tex Schramm lobbied for his upstart team in Dallas to join the Lions in hosting a game on Thanksgiving to give his relatively new franchise national exposure. You might say it worked. Dallas is today the most valuable franchise in professional sports. The one-time blot on the city best known for being the site of the John Kennedy assasination in public awareness, shifted to the distinction of Dallas and their Cowboys being known as America’s Team.
It was American Football League founder and Kansas City Chiefs Owner Lamar Hunt who championed the league to add a third game to be played on this holiday. It was decided not to have one team host the late Thanksgiving game every year, but offer the home site and opponent on a rotating basis.
Two things interesting about the third game. Hunt’s Chiefs did host that first Thanksgiving night game and beat the Denver Broncos, 19-10, and Hunt lived just long enough to see his quest for a third Thanksgiving game come to fruition. He died in 2006 less than three weeks after that Kansas City win.
A few years ago, there was chatter about the possibility of stripping the tradition away from the Lions hosting a Thanksgiving game. The reason was simple, the franchise had been so weak for so long that the holiday routinely began with the Lions getting their butts kicked by the Green Bay Packers, Buffalo Bills or seemingly any other team the league scheduled for the game in Detroit.
Now, the Lions are among the best teams in the league, and tomorrow the NFL has perhaps the best schedule ever for the three-game schedule. All six teams in action on Thursday have interest buzzing around them for playoff implications or, in the case of the late game today, a quarterback situation. We will find out on Thanksgiving whether Lamar Jackson is headed to the sideline with an injury for the Baltimore Ravens, and if the Cincinnati Bengals Joe Burrow is ready to see his first action since suffering a toe injury in the season’s second week.