PUT ON YOUR TEAM JERSEY AND GET READY FOR THE GAME.
THIS STROLL WILL BRING ON CHEERS!
For some of folks it's annoying and for the cooks of those great Thankgiving dinners it's a scheduling nightmare but we manage to get the Turkey on the table at halftime unless we plan on eating alone...
Happy Thanksgiving to our Football fans and those who love them!
The first Thanksgiving Day football game was the 1876 Intercollegiate Football Association championship. The first National Football League (NFL) Thanksgiving Day game was in 1920 when the Akron Pros defeated the Canton Bulldogs 7-0. The Bulldogs’ star player was Jim Thorpe.
The first-ever radio broadcast of an NFL game was the Thanksgiving Day game between the Detroit Lions and the Chicago Bears on November 29, 1934; this began Detroit's tradition of playing on Thanksgiving. By 1940, 83 percent of all U.S. households had a radio.
The first televised Thanksgiving Day football game aired on November 22, 1956 when the Green Bay Packers defeated the Detroit Lions 24-20. The 1950 Census tells us that less than 10 percent of all households owned a television in 1950. However, by 1960, 87 percent of households owned at least one television.
Professional football on Thanksgiving is actually a tradition that predates the league's formation itself. Records of pro football being played on Thanksgiving date back to as early as the 1890s, with the first pro–am team, the Allegheny Athletic Association of Pittsburgh. In 1902, the "National" Football League, a Major League Baseball-backed organization based entirely in Pennsylvania and unrelated to the current NFL, attempted to settle its championship over Thanksgiving weekend; after the game ended in a tie, eventually all three teams in the league claimed to have won the title.
Members of the Ohio League, during its early years, usually placed their marquee matchups on Thanksgiving Day. For instance, in 1905 and 1906 the Latrobe Athletic Association and Canton Bulldogs, considered at the time to be two of the best teams in professional football (along with the Massillon Tigers), played on Thanksgiving. A rigging scandal with the Tigers leading up to the 1906 game led to severe drops in attendance for the Bulldogs and ultimately led to their suspension of operations. During the 1910s, the Ohio League stopped holding Thanksgiving games because many of its players coached high school teams and were unavailable. This was not the case in other regional circuits: in 1919, the New York Pro Football League featured a Thanksgiving matchup between the Buffalo Prospects and the Rochester Jeffersons. The game ended in a scoreless tie, leading to a rematch the next Sunday for the league championship.
The first owner of the Lions, G.A. Richards, started the tradition of the Thanksgiving Day game as a gimmick to get people to go to Lions football games, and to continue a tradition begun by the city's previous NFL teams.
Several other NFL teams played regularly on Thanksgiving in first eighteen years of the league, including the Chicago Bears and Chicago Cardinals (1922-33; the Bears played the Lions from 1934 to 1938 while the Cardinals switched to the Green Bay Packers for 1934 and 1935), Frankford Yellow Jackets, and the New York Giants (1929–38, who always played a crosstown rival). During the Franksgiving controversy in 1939 and 1940, the only two teams to play the game were the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles, as both teams were in the same state (Pennsylvania). (At the time, then-president Franklin Roosevelt wanted to move the holiday for economic reasons and many states were resistant to the move; half the states recognized the move and the other half did not.
This complicated scheduling for Thanksgiving games. Incidentally, the two teams were also exploring the possibility of a merger at the time.[2]) Because of the looming World War II and the resulting shorter seasons, the NFL did not schedule any Thanksgiving games in 1941, nor did it schedule any in the subsequent years until the war ended in 1945. When the Thanksgiving games resumed in 1945, only one game would be played each year (except 1950 and 1952), and only the Lions would have a permanent Thanksgiving game. In 1951, the Packers resumed its regular role on Thanksgiving, becoming the perpetual opponent to the Lions each year through 1963.
In 1966, the Dallas Cowboys, who had been founded six years earlier, adopted the practice of hosting Thanksgiving games. It is widely rumored that the Cowboys sought a guarantee that they would regularly host Thanksgiving games as a condition of their very first one (since games on days other than Sunday were uncommon at the time and thus high attendance was not a certainty). Incidentally, Texas was the last state to recognize the "fourth Thursday" rule for Thanksgiving that had been imposed as a result of the Thanksgiving compromise two decades prior, and had just adopted the rule (as opposed to the previous last Thanksgiving rule) in 1961, five years before Dallas started hosting Thanksgiving games. (The fourth and final Thursdays were the same between 1957 and 1960; the last time Texas had celebrated Thanksgiving on the week after the rest of the country was 1956.) The two "traditional" Thanksgiving Day pro football games have then been in Detroit and Dallas. Because of TV network commitments, to make sure that both the AFC-carrying network and the NFC-carrying network got at least one game each, one of these games was between NFC opponents, and one featured AFC-NFC opponents. Thus, the AFC could showcase only one team on Thanksgiving, and the AFC team was always the visiting team.
No matter where you are if you're a football fan...I'm sure there's enough football on Thanksgiving Day to keep everyone happy!
Strolling Down Memory Lane with Candy - Main Page
My Compliments to Candy on Football in November!