Thanksgiving Football Began With College Kids and a Radio Man

Quick answer: Yale and Princeton played the first big Thanksgiving Day football game in 1876. The Detroit Lions have hosted on Thanksgiving since 1934, minus the war years, and the Dallas Cowboys since 1966.

Every piece of this tradition started as somebody's business idea. Somebody needed a crowd, a gate or an audience, and picked the one Thursday when everyone was home. Families did the rest.

Yale, Princeton and an empty Thursday

In 1876 a handful of eastern colleges formed the Intercollegiate Football Association and scheduled their championship game for Thanksgiving Day. Yale beat Princeton at the St. George's Cricket Grounds in Hoboken, New Jersey. The game looked more like rugby than anything you'll see this November.

The date was the smart part. Students were off. Families were in town. And there was nothing else to do between breakfast and dinner.

Within a few years the championship moved into New York City, and by the 1890s the Thanksgiving game in Manhattan had become a full-blown society event. Tens of thousands showed up. Carriages decked out in school colors rolled up Fifth Avenue. Newspapers covered the crowd almost as closely as the score.

Then the idea spread. College teams, athletic clubs and high schools all over the country wanted their own Thanksgiving game, and they got them. By the turn of the century, football on Thanksgiving wasn't a novelty. It was simply what Americans did on that Thursday.

The pros showed up in year one

The league that became the NFL played on Thanksgiving in its very first season, 1920. Small towns, small crowds, teams like the Akron Pros and Canton Bulldogs. Nobody outside the Midwest noticed much.

That changed because of one man in Detroit.

A radio man buys a football team

George A. Richards owned WJR, a Detroit radio station. In 1934 he bought the Portsmouth Spartans, moved them to Detroit and renamed them the Lions. He had a problem. Detroit was a baseball town, and his new team was nobody's priority.

So he scheduled a Thanksgiving game against the defending champion Chicago Bears and leaned on his radio connections to get it on NBC's network nationwide.

It worked. The game at University of Detroit Stadium sold out, fans got turned away, and the Bears won 19-16. Richards lost the game and won the argument. Detroit has hosted on Thanksgiving every year since, except for 1939 through 1944.

Think about that the next time somebody calls the Lions game a tired obligation. It's been running since before your grandfather could drive. It's the closest thing pro football has to a family heirloom.

The year the president moved Thanksgiving

In 1939, Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving up a week, to November 23, to stretch the Christmas shopping season. Roughly half the states went along. The rest stuck with the old date, and a few celebrated both.

Football schedules turned into a mess. Colleges had booked their big rivalry games for the traditional Thursday months in advance, and now half the country was eating turkey on a different day. Critics took to calling it "Franksgiving."

Congress settled it in 1941, fixing Thanksgiving as the fourth Thursday in November. It's been that way since. If you've ever wondered why the date jumps around, now you know.

Dallas wanted the cameras

By the mid-1960s the NFL worried that a second Thanksgiving game wouldn't draw. Tex Schramm, the Cowboys' general manager, volunteered anyway. He wasn't thinking about the 1966 ticket count. He was thinking about a young franchise in front of a national TV audience on a day when the whole country was on the couch.

The Cowboys beat the Cleveland Browns 26-14 that first year and have hosted every Thanksgiving since, with two exceptions. The league handed the game to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1975 and 1977. It didn't stick, and Dallas got it back in 1978.

That's the pattern. The Lions got the game because a radio owner needed listeners. The Cowboys got it because their GM wanted television. Neither one was sentimental. The sentiment came later, from you.

The AFL played its own Thanksgiving games in the 1960s. The NFL added a permanent night game in 2006, and in 2023 it went further and put a game on Black Friday. The full slate today usually kicks off around 12:30, 4:30 and 8:20 p.m. Eastern.

Snow, a coin and a backup nobody knew

Every family has its Thanksgiving football story. These are the league's.

1974, Cowboys vs. Washington. Roger Staubach went down hurt. A rookie backup named Clint Longley came in, and with the clock running out he threw a long touchdown to Drew Pearson to win it 24-23. Longley barely played again. For one afternoon he was the most famous man in Texas. It belongs in any list of NFL comebacks that prove nobody's ever really finished.

1993, Dolphins at Cowboys. Snow in Dallas. Miami's late field goal attempt got blocked, and the play should've been dead. Then Leon Lett slid into the loose ball, touched it, and Miami recovered. The Dolphins kicked again and won 16-14. Every kid who's ever been told "just leave it alone" has a reference point now.

1998, Steelers at Lions. Overtime coin toss. Jerome Bettis said he called tails. The referee heard heads. Detroit got the ball and won. The league tightened its coin-toss procedure afterward, which is the most fitting result possible for a holiday built on family arguments.

Where the old version still lives

The NFL owns the TV. It doesn't own the tradition.

Go to Massachusetts on Thanksgiving morning. Needham and Wellesley have played each other since 1882, and it's usually counted among the oldest public high school rivalries in the country. All over New England and in pockets of the Midwest and South, town rivalries kick off at 10 a.m. Grown men in letter jackets that no longer zip. Grandmothers in folding chairs. A marching band that's been practicing in the cold for weeks.

That's the 1890s Manhattan game, scaled down to a town where everybody knows the quarterback's mother. And those games are fragile. When enrollment drops or a district consolidates, the rivalry can vanish in a single vote. If you've never thought about what a small town loses when the Friday night lights go out, a Thanksgiving morning game will teach you fast.

College football kept a piece of it too. Texas and Texas A&M met around Thanksgiving for most of a century before conference realignment split them up after 2011, and the rivalry finally came back in 2024. Ole Miss and Mississippi State have played the Egg Bowl on Thanksgiving night in recent years.

How to do the day right

Skip the argument over whether football ruins Thanksgiving. It doesn't. It gives a crowded house something to share between meals, and it gives the uncle who doesn't talk much something to talk about.

A few things make the day better:

• Find the local morning game. Check your district's athletics page or the local paper a week out. Take the kids. It's cheap, it's outdoors and it's over by noon.
• Leave the bleachers better than you found them. Pick up your cups and the ones next to yours. Buy something from the booster table. Those volunteers are why the game still exists.
• Set the house rule early. Watch the noon and afternoon games if you want. When dinner's on the table, the TV goes off. Whoever cooked deserves your attention more than a second-quarter punt.
• Stay to clean up. If you're a guest, you're on dish duty during the late game. Bring something when you come. Leave the kitchen cleaner than it was.
• Teach the kids one thing. Pick one detail to point out during the game. If you want somewhere to start, watch the safeties first and show them how the whole field opens up.

A radio man in 1934 needed people to tune in. Ninety-some years later, your family's doing exactly what he hoped for, just with better stuffing.