NFL on Thanksgiving Day

• 1. Introduction

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  NFL Thanksgiving Day games broke every record they held on the 27th of November 2025. The Kansas City Chiefs and Dallas Cowboys drew 57.2 million viewers on CBS and Paramount+. The broadcast peaked at 61.4 million viewers by the game's final minutes. The overall average across all three games that day reached 44.7 million, the highest single-day figure on record going back to 1988.

  Two franchises have each held a permanent Thanksgiving slot for over four decades. A third game was added in prime time in 2006. Neither arrangement was accidental. The full tradition reaches back not to the NFL, but to a college game played in 1876.

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• 2. Roots in College Football

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  In 1876, the football teams at Yale and Princeton began playing each other on Thanksgiving Day, establishing what became an annual tradition. The University of Michigan followed, playing 19 such games between 1885 and 1905. The matchups between Michigan and the Chicago Maroons in the 1890s were later cited as the beginning of Thanksgiving Day football. In parts of the country, particularly New England, high school teams still play on Thanksgiving to close out the regular season.

  Records of professional football being played on Thanksgiving reach back to the 1890s. The Allegheny Athletic Association of Pittsburgh was among the first documented professional teams to take part. In 1902, a Pennsylvania organization that happened to share the name National Football League tried to settle its championship over Thanksgiving weekend. This group was backed by Major League Baseball and had no connection to today's NFL. The game ended in a tie, and all three teams in the league eventually claimed to have won the title.

  In the early 1900s, the Ohio League made Thanksgiving the slot for its biggest matchups. The Latrobe Athletic Association and the Canton Bulldogs were considered two of the best teams in professional football at the time. They met on Thanksgiving in both 1905 and 1906. A rigging scandal involving the Massillon Tigers before the 1906 game drove attendance down sharply. The fallout forced the Canton Bulldogs to suspend operations.

  By 1919, the New York Pro Football League was staging its own Thanksgiving contest. The Buffalo Prospects and the Rochester Jeffersons played to a scoreless tie. That tie prompted a championship rematch the following Sunday. When the NFL launched in 1920, it played Thanksgiving games in its very first season. Within fourteen years of its founding, one franchise would figure out how to turn the holiday into a national event.

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• 3. Detroit's Holiday Home

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  George A. Richards, the first owner of the Detroit Lions, started the city's Thanksgiving tradition as a way to draw fans to the stadium. He intended to continue a custom that earlier Detroit NFL franchises had already established. What separated the Lions from other teams playing on the holiday was that Richards owned WJR, a major affiliate of the NBC Blue Network. That network was the forerunner to today's ABC, and Richards negotiated with NBC to carry his Thanksgiving games live across the country.

  Detroit had hosted NFL Thanksgiving games since 1925. That year, the city's second franchise, the Detroit Panthers, played host to the Rock Island Independents. The visitors won 6-3. A third Detroit franchise, the Wolverines, hosted a Thanksgiving game in 1928 during their only year of existence. They beat the Dayton Triangles 33-0 at University of Detroit Stadium. The Lions, the city's fourth NFL franchise, began their tradition in 1934. Chicago won 19-16 in front of 26,000 fans.

  During the Franksgiving controversy of 1939 and 1940, then-President Franklin Roosevelt proposed moving Thanksgiving earlier for economic reasons. Half the country recognized the change and half did not. Scheduling became nearly impossible for the NFL. The only teams to play on the holiday were the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Philadelphia Eagles, who shared a state.

  From 1941 through 1944, the NFL scheduled no Thanksgiving games at all as World War II shortened the professional season. When the games resumed in 1945, only the Lions' home game remained on the calendar. In 1951, the Green Bay Packers began a 13-season run as the Lions' permanent Thanksgiving opponent. That pairing became known as the Yooper Bowl. The name came from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, whose residents are called yoopers. That peninsula marks roughly the boundary between the two teams' territories and fanbases. The partnership ran through 1963. Three years later, another franchise would stake its own permanent claim on the holiday.

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• 4. The Cowboys' Claim

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  In 1966, the Dallas Cowboys, who had been founded just six years earlier, joined the Detroit Lions as a permanent Thanksgiving host. Their first game ended in a 26-14 win over the visiting Cleveland Browns. The popular account of how Dallas secured the slot holds that the Cowboys demanded a permanent guarantee before agreeing to play. The truth is more interesting: team president Tex Schramm volunteered Dallas as host when the NFL proposed adding a second Thanksgiving game.

  Schramm had two practical calculations in mind. A nationally televised game in a permanent holiday slot offered publicity that ordinary scheduling could not replicate. He also argued that the shorter week gave the home team a structural edge. The visiting team would lose three days of practice plus additional travel time, while Dallas could spend that window preparing at home.

  In 1975, Commissioner Pete Rozelle arranged for the St. Louis Cardinals to replace Dallas as Thanksgiving host. Dallas hosted St. Louis in 1976 during the same stretch, and the Cardinals returned as host in 1977. The Cardinals were known as the Cardiac Cards for their habit of winning close games, and they achieved some success in that period. They never approached the Cowboys' national following. Attendance in St. Louis was consistently weak. The Cardinals lost all three of their Thanksgiving appearances by wide margins. Local fans often preferred the Kirkwood-Webster Groves Turkey Day Game, a long-established high school football contest, over the NFL offering.

  Dallas resumed permanent hosting in 1978 and received a written guarantee that the arrangement would continue indefinitely. Since then, Detroit has played in the early afternoon slot and Dallas in the late afternoon every Thanksgiving. The Cowboys' Thanksgiving game has regularly been the most-watched NFL regular season telecast of each year it is played.

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• 5. Madden at the Microphone

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  John Madden began broadcasting NFL Thanksgiving games on CBS in 1981. He would call 20 of them as lead analyst over two decades. His run on CBS lasted through 1993; from 1994, he continued the tradition on Fox.

  In 1989, Madden began awarding a turkey drumstick to each game's most valuable player. Reggie White was the first recipient. In 1990, Madden commented on air that the Dallas Cowboys' offensive linemen deserved multiple drumsticks. A Texas barbecue owner heard the remark and created a six-legged turkey for the broadcast. The tradition expanded in 1997 when Madden introduced the turducken: a chicken stuffed inside a duck stuffed inside a turkey.

  Madden's run broadcasting Thanksgiving games ended in 2002. He died in December 2021. On the 11th of November 2022, the NFL announced a new name for the Thanksgiving games. The series would henceforth be called the John Madden Thanksgiving Celebration.

  The turducken Madden brought to the broadcast table outlasted him. During the Fox broadcast of the Giants-Cowboys game in 2024, new commentator Tom Brady was introduced to the dish on air. Brady tasted it and said it was amazing. Viewers debated whether he had eaten the full combination or only the turkey leg. The Salvation Army has kicked off its Christmas Kettle campaign at the Dallas game halftime show every year since 1997. The NFL considers the holiday halftime shows second in prominence only to the Super Bowl's.

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• 6. Games That Defined the Series

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  In 1929, Chicago Cardinals running back Ernie Nevers accounted for every point his team scored on Thanksgiving Day. He totaled all 40 in a rout of the Chicago Bears. The final score was 40-6. No player has matched that single-game total in the decades since.

  The 1952 Thanksgiving game produced one of the holiday series' most unlikely upsets. The expansion Dallas Texans had no venue for their final home game and moved it to the Rubber Bowl in Akron, Ohio. Their opponent, the Chicago Bears, underestimated the winless Texans and sent their second-string roster. The Texans won 27-23. It was the only victory in their brief existence.

  On the 28th of November 1974, the Dallas Cowboys lost starting quarterback Roger Staubach to an injury and fell behind Washington. A backup named Clint Longley, unknown and untested before that afternoon, came off the bench. He led a fourth-quarter comeback that ended with Dallas winning 24-23.

  Leon Lett's 1993 blunder may be the most replayed moment in the holiday series' history. Lett blocked what appeared to be a game-winning Miami Dolphins field goal in the final seconds. He then touched the spinning ball, a dead play under NFL rules, and turned it into a live fumble. The Dolphins recovered. Kicker Pete Stoyanovich attempted the field goal again from close range and made it, giving Miami a 16-14 win.

  In 1998, Detroit's overtime contest against Pittsburgh produced a dispute that outlasted the game. Steelers running back Jerome Bettis called the coin flip by saying both heads and tails. Head referee Phil Luckett declared Detroit the winner on live television. The Lions received the ball in overtime and won on their first possession. Later that same afternoon, Minnesota Vikings rookie wide receiver Randy Moss caught 3 passes for 163 yards and 3 touchdowns against the Cowboys in Dallas. That game was personal for Moss: the Cowboys had passed on him in that year's NFL draft.

  In 2023, Cowboys cornerback DaRon Bland broke the single-season NFL record for interceptions returned for touchdowns. He recorded his fifth such return in a 45-10 rout of the Washington Commanders. The record fell on Thanksgiving Day.

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• 7. Prime Time Arrives

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  Lamar Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, had lobbied the NFL for years to add a third Thanksgiving game. His franchise had hosted Thanksgiving games from 1967 to 1969 as an AFL team, before the AFL-NFL merger. When the league agreed to a prime time contest in 2006, the Chiefs were selected as the first host.

  Hunt was hospitalized in Dallas the night that first tripleheader was played. He died weeks later at the age of 74. His three-game vision had been realized just in time.

  The third game originally aired on the NFL Network as part of its Thursday Night Football package. In 2012, it moved to NBC, completing an arrangement in which all three broadcast networks with Sunday NFL rights each carry one Thanksgiving game. The night game has no permanent host; the league can place any two teams into the slot.

  In 2020, multiple Baltimore Ravens players and staff tested positive for COVID-19 before their scheduled prime time game against the Pittsburgh Steelers. The game was postponed first to November 29, then to the 2nd of December. It was the first Thanksgiving without a prime time contest since 2005.

  The 2025 afternoon game between the Green Bay Packers and the Detroit Lions drew 47.7 million viewers on Fox. The night game between the Cincinnati Bengals and the Baltimore Ravens averaged 28.4 million viewers across NBC, Peacock, and Telemundo. That figure made it the most-watched Thanksgiving night game in NFL history. Digital streaming across all three games delivered an average minute audience of 2.2 million viewers, itself a record for the holiday. Commissioner Roger Goodell confirmed in 2025 that he did not anticipate changes to the permanent hosting arrangements. For 2026, the league had already scheduled both the Buffalo Bills and the Chicago Bears to play on both Thanksgiving and Christmas. When critics raised concerns about the scheduling, the NFL's response was brief: 'Fans vote with their remotes.'

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