Food, Family, and Football: Here’s how the NFL has become an irreplaceable part of Thanksgiving festivities over the years
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Thanksgiving without football is like having a turkey without stuffing.
It’s that time of the year again! Thanksgiving festivities are back in full effect, and everyone’s mood is extremely positive. The festival marks the celebration of the harvest of the year and is a momentous occasion where friends and family gather together to enjoy and celebrate one another’s accomplishments and express their gratitude for their existence. While Turkey, mashed potatoes, gravy, and mouth-watering desserts are all essential to the celebration, over the years, there has been another activity that has become a custom.
Thanksgiving is incomplete without football. For those hailing from families with athletes and sporty individuals, it is playing a game of backyard football, but for the most, it is watching the Thursday Night Football games on TV. Thanksgiving night brings in a lot of viewership for the NFL.
The proof of the pudding is in the eating. Take the 2021 NFL Thanksgiving game, for instance, the Dallas Cowboys faced off against the Las Vegas Raiders. A whopping 38.5 million people were avidly watching this game. That is a lot of people!
To find out how the game has become such an integral part of the celebrations, we need to take a walk down history. Football initially began as a sport that was exclusive to the top colleges across the nation. It was essentially like golf, as only those hailing from top institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and Columbia were the ones who played it regularly.
Football transitioned into a social event rather than just a sporting event:
In 1880, the game of football began to gather more interest and the final game of the intercollegiate Football Association was held in The Big Apple. This move benefitted the sport as it marked the beginning of football becoming a social event. As per Matthew Andrews, a professor of history at UNC, Chapel Hill, “This game was sort of the unofficial start of the winter holiday social season.”
“People from the different colleges and universities would flood New York City, and there would be pregame Wednesday night dinners and Friday and Saturday night there would be post-game balls and trips to the theater. That’s when it really takes off in the 1880s and the 1890s.” This era solidified the position of football as a Thanksgiving tradition.
Football began to become popular just a few decades after Thanksgiving was officially declared an annual holiday by former President Abraham Lincoln. In hindsight, the sport and the festival complimented one another’s growth. The holiday boosted the attraction toward the sport and it made the festival one that many began to look forward to.
The sport became popular because it brought people together, kind of like Thanksgiving if you think about it. As mentioned above, when football was just becoming popular, it was played by those from ivy league schools. The rivalry between students from these institutions as we know is fierce and a game between two-lifetime competitors was one that excited not just the player but also the fans who showed up in large numbers to cheer for their team of choice.
As is the case with every new trend, there is always someone looking to bash it and that rule applied to the game of football as well. In 1893, the New York Herald criticized the game by stating that it was ruining the essence of Thanksgiving. “Thanksgiving is no longer a solemn festival to God for mercies given. It is a holiday granted to the state and nation to see a game of football,” was the justification given by the publication for its criticism.
How the NFL cemented football as a ritual on Thanksgiving?
Football was getting popular by the day, but there was no professional league yet which could really help the game take off. In 1920, the NFL came into existence, and, of course, in its first couple of years, nobody really paid much heed to it. The league was attempting to do something unconventional for that time by getting athletes to professionally play football.
In an attempt to grow the league and the game, the officials decided to schedule more games on Thanksgiving. By this point, football and Thanksgiving had already become somewhat of a custom, but the league made it into a ritual. During those years, the NFL conducted 6 games on Thanksgiving as opposed to the 3-game schedule we see today.
Their plan did work to perfection as fans began to gain more and more interest. Fast forward 40 years, and the words NFL and Thanksgiving had become synonymous with one another. At this time, around the 1970s, the Dallas Cowboys began their Thanksgiving tradition of playing every year on the holiday. The team hosted a game on a special day every year which benefitted them as it increased their fanbase while also helping grow the sport.
The Detroit Lions were another team who have also been playing on Thanksgiving since time immemorial. To this day, Dallas and Detroit play on this special day every year. As time progressed, the league began to add more teams and, of course, the newer teams wanted a piece of the Thanksgiving primetime turkey.
Owing to the pressure from other teams, in 2006, the league decided to add a third Thanksgiving game; the teams playing would be decided on a rotating basis. Now, football and Thanksgiving have become inseparable. Fans look forward to these games.
As sacred as the holiday is, watching their favorite teams go at it means a lot more to people today. For the NFL and its partners, they get a nice piece of their Turkey with gravy as the viewership count and ad revenue generated is ridiculously high! Some days, maybe Thanksgiving may not have a stuffed turkey on the table but there will always be a football game on the TV.
With reference from: CNN
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Sumedh Joshi
(2259 Articles Published)