NFL Thanksgiving Games: Why the Lions and Cowboys Host
Why the Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys host the NFL Thanksgiving games every year, how the third game is chosen, and where the holiday tradition came from.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished NFL Season & Playoffs25 min read
- Lions' first Thanksgiving game
- 1934
- Cowboys' first Thanksgiving game
- 1966
- Prime-time game added
- 2006
- Games on Thanksgiving Day
- 3
Three NFL games are played on Thanksgiving Day, and two of them never move. The Detroit Lions host the first, in the early afternoon, because of a game their owner staged in 1934. The Dallas Cowboys host the second, in the late afternoon, because their general manager Tex Schramm volunteered for a second holiday game in 1966 and later secured a promise that it would stay. The third, at night, was added in 2006 and has no permanent home. Nothing in the league's playing rules requires any of this. It is a scheduling custom that the NFL has honored for so long that it now functions as a rule.
It started on Thursday, November 29, 1934, when about 26,000 people filled University of Detroit Stadium to watch a football team that had not existed in the city a year earlier. The Lions were 10-1. Their opponents, the Chicago Bears, were 11-0 and the defending champions. The Lions' owner, a radio executive named George A. Richards, had asked for the holiday date because he could not get Detroit to look away from its baseball team, and he had arranged for the game to go out coast to coast on a network of 94 stations. Chicago won 19-16. Detroit has hosted on Thanksgiving ever since, with one six-year interruption.
The fixed shape of the day: three NFL Thanksgiving games, two permanent hosts
- 3Games on Thanksgiving Day
- 1934Year the Lions first hosted
- 1966Year the Cowboys first hosted
- 2006Year the night game was added
Years in which each part of the holiday schedule began, and the number of games played on Thanksgiving Day itself. Wednesday and Friday games are counted separately.
The schedule for the fourth Thursday of November is the most predictable day on the NFL calendar. Before the opponents are known, before the spring schedule release, three things are already settled: there will be a game in Detroit, a game in the Dallas area, and a game somewhere else after dark.
| Slot | Kickoff, Eastern time | Host | Since |
|---|---|---|---|
| Early game | 12:30 p.m. for decades, 1:00 p.m. in 2025 | Detroit Lions | 1934, continuous from 1945 |
| Late afternoon game | 4:30 p.m. | Dallas Cowboys | 1966, continuous from 1978 |
| Night game | 8:20 p.m. | No fixed host | 2006 |
| Black Friday game | Mid-afternoon the next day | No fixed host | 2023 |
| Thanksgiving Eve game | Wednesday night | No fixed host | 2026 |
The visitors change every year. The league assigns opponents to Detroit and Dallas when it builds the schedule, choosing from the eight or nine home games each club already has under the scheduling formula. Division rivals turn up often, because six of every team's games are against its own division and those games carry a ready-made edge. For thirteen seasons in a row, from 1951 through 1963, the Lions' Thanksgiving opponent was Green Bay.
The Thanksgiving games sit outside the league's system for moving games between broadcast windows late in the year. A game assigned to the holiday in the spring is played on the holiday. Our guide to how flex scheduling moves games in December covers the windows where that is not true.
One more fixed point. The two host clubs have both moved since their first holiday games, and the tradition moved with them. Detroit's game went from University of Detroit Stadium to Briggs Stadium, later renamed Tiger Stadium, then to the Pontiac Silverdome in 1975 and Ford Field in 2002. Dallas began at the Cotton Bowl, moved to Texas Stadium in Irving in 1971 and to its current home in Arlington in 2009. The custom belongs to the franchise, not the building.
Why the Lions always play on Thanksgiving: George Richards and the 1934 Bears
The Lions were new. Until the spring of 1934 they had been the Portsmouth Spartans, a good team in a small Ohio river town that could not support an NFL payroll in the Depression. Richards, who owned radio station WJR in Detroit, bought the club, moved it and renamed it.
He had a problem that any marketing department would recognize. Detroit in 1934 was a baseball city in the middle of a pennant year, the Tigers having just won the American League. Earlier professional football teams there had folded or left. The Lions were excellent from their first game, shutting out their first seven opponents, and still played to thin crowds.
Richards's answer was a holiday game against the best draw in the league. Earlier Detroit pro teams had played on Thanksgiving in the 1920s, so the idea was not new to the city, but he gave it two things those games never had. One was the opponent: George Halas's Bears, unbeaten, with Bronko Nagurski in the backfield. The other was radio. As the owner of an important affiliate, Richards had the standing to persuade the NBC network to carry the game nationally, and 94 stations took it.
The stadium, which held about 26,000, sold out roughly two weeks ahead, and the club has always said it turned people away at the gate. The Lions led at the half and lost by three. They lost to the Bears again in Chicago three days later, and the Bears finished the regular season unbeaten before losing the championship game to the Giants.
It did not matter that Detroit lost. Richards had a full house, a national audience and a date that the city now associated with his team. The following year the Lions beat the Bears on Thanksgiving and went on to win the NFL championship, and by then the game was simply what Detroit did on the holiday.
What made it stick
Plenty of clubs played on Thanksgiving in the 1930s. The Lions are the ones still doing it because they never treated the date as available. Other teams took a holiday game in a season when it suited the schedule and skipped it when it did not. Detroit asked for it every year, the league gave it to them, and after a couple of decades the request was no longer needed. Tradition in the NFL is mostly persistence, and this is the clearest case.
Why the Cowboys always play on Thanksgiving: Tex Schramm's 1966 gamble
By the mid-1960s the Lions' game was a television fixture, and the league wanted a second one to follow it. The difficulty was finding a host. A Thursday home game meant a short week of preparation and, club executives feared, a poor crowd on a day when people had other plans.
Tex Schramm, the president and general manager of the Dallas Cowboys, saw it differently. His franchise was in its seventh season and had never had a winning one. It shared a city with the memory of an American Football League team that had left for Kansas City three years earlier, and it was just becoming good. What Schramm wanted was a national television audience that came back every year at the same hour, and a holiday afternoon game was the surest way to get one.
The league was nervous enough about attendance that it reportedly guaranteed Dallas a minimum gate. The guarantee was never needed. On November 24, 1966, a crowd of 80,259 at the Cotton Bowl, the largest the Cowboys had drawn, watched them beat the Cleveland Browns 26-14. Dallas reached the NFL Championship Game that season and the one after, and the phrase "America's Team," coined later by NFL Films, owes something to a decade of the country seeing that helmet every Thanksgiving while the turkey was still on the table.
The two years St. Louis hosted
The Cowboys' run has two holes in it, and they explain why the arrangement is now permanent.
In 1975 Commissioner Pete Rozelle asked Dallas to give the game up so that the St. Louis Cardinals, then a contending team with an exciting offense, could have the showcase. St. Louis hosted Buffalo that year and lost 32-14. In 1976 the Cardinals played on Thanksgiving again, as visitors in Dallas. In 1977 they hosted Miami and lost 55-14, with Bob Griese throwing six touchdown passes.
The experiment did not take. The Cardinals lost all three games, the crowds in St. Louis were disappointing, and the pro game there ran up against a long-established local high school rivalry played on the same day. Rozelle asked Schramm to take the game back.
Schramm agreed, with a condition. The usual version of the story is that Dallas demanded a permanent guarantee before hosting its very first holiday game in 1966. The better-supported version puts the guarantee here, in 1978: the Cowboys would resume hosting if the league promised the date was theirs for good. It did, and Dallas has hosted every Thanksgiving since.
The third game: a prime-time slot with no permanent home
For 36 seasons after the merger the holiday had two games and no way for any other club to host one. The third game, first played on November 23, 2006, was the league's answer.
Its origins are partly commercial and partly a concession. The NFL had just started carrying live regular-season games on its own cable channel and needed attractive dates to launch the package; Thanksgiving night was the most attractive date available. At the same time Lamar Hunt, the founder of the Kansas City Chiefs, had spent years arguing that the holiday should not belong to two franchises. The first night game went to Kansas City, where the Chiefs beat Denver 19-10. Hunt died less than three weeks later.
The night game has no host, no conference affiliation and no rotation formula. The league picks the matchup as part of building the schedule, and in practice it looks for the same things it wants in any prime-time game: two teams expected to be good, a rivalry if one is available, and large followings. It moved from the league's cable channel to a broadcast network in 2012.
Three constraints shape the choice. Neither Detroit nor Dallas can be in it, since each is already playing that afternoon. Both teams must be able to absorb a Thursday game after a Sunday one, which the league limits per club over a season. And the home team needs a stadium and a city ready to stage a night game on a holiday, which is less trivial than it sounds for police, transit and stadium staff.
The night game has already produced one play that outlived its season. On Thanksgiving night in 2012 the New York Jets quarterback Mark Sanchez ran into the backside of his own guard and fumbled, New England returned the ball for a touchdown, and the Patriots scored three times in under a minute on the way to a 49-19 win.
The slot has spread the holiday around without, so far, reaching everyone. Through the 2025 season the Jacksonville Jaguars remained the only current franchise never to have played a Thanksgiving game, a distinction that moves the first time the league sends them one.
The short week: what Thursday costs the visitors and what the hosts get back
Every team that plays on Thanksgiving played the previous Sunday. That is the cost of the day, and it does not fall evenly.
A normal NFL week has a rhythm that coaches guard closely: a day of recovery and film, a day off, three days of practice, a walkthrough, a game. The short week removes most of it. There is one real practice, usually without pads, and the game plan is thinner because there is less time to install and rehearse it. The collective bargaining agreement between the league and the NFL Players Association restricts what clubs can ask of players physically, and on a short week most coaches ask for less than the limit.
For the visiting team, add a flight. They play on Sunday, review on Monday, practice lightly on Tuesday, travel on Wednesday and play on Thursday, having spent the holiday eve in a hotel.
The home team has the same four days but none of the travel. And for Detroit and Dallas there is a second advantage that is easy to miss: they do this every year. The staff has a short-week template refined over decades. Veterans know what the Tuesday practice will be before it is announced. A visiting club might play a Thursday road game after a Sunday once a season, or not at all.
Then comes the payoff. A team that plays on Thursday and next plays on the following Sunday has ten days between games, which is close to a second week off. Players commonly get the weekend away. For the two permanent hosts that late-November "mini-bye" arrives every single year, at the point in the season when bodies are most worn. It is a different thing from the true week off described in our guide to the NFL bye week, but a coach will take it.
The visitors get the ten days as well, so the long rest is not the inequity. The inequity is on the front end, in who has to travel on the short week and who has done it thirty times before.
The objection to permanent hosts, and why the league has never rotated them
The case against the arrangement is simple and has been made by owners inside the league as well as by columnists outside it. Two clubs are guaranteed a home game on the short week every year, a national audience every year, and the long rest every year. Thirty are not. A league that shares its television money equally and drafts in reverse order of finish does not usually hand out fixed advantages.
Hunt pressed the point for decades. His team had hosted holiday games in the American Football League and lost them in the merger, and he argued for a rotation that would give every city a turn. The night game was as far as the league was prepared to go.
The loudest calls for change have come when Detroit was bad. The Lions lost nine consecutive Thanksgiving games from 2004 through 2012, a stretch that included a 47-10 loss to Tennessee in 2008, the season they finished 0-16. A national audience watching a one-sided game over dinner prompted the obvious suggestion that the early slot go to someone else. The commissioner said at the time that the Lions would keep the game and that the question could be looked at again. It has not been reopened in any serious way, and in 2025 he said he did not expect a change.
There are a few reasons the league has held the line.
The audience does not appear to depend on the quality of the teams. Thanksgiving games are among the most-watched regular-season broadcasts of every year, and the late afternoon game from Dallas has set records for a regular-season audience more than once. The hosts are part of what viewers tune in for. Replacing a known quantity with a rotating one would be a risk taken to fix a problem the ratings do not show.
The promise to Dallas was explicit, and Detroit's claim rests on a custom nine decades old, unbroken since 1945.
And a rotation is harder to run than it looks. Hosting a holiday game requires a stadium, a city and a fan base willing to give up Thanksgiving afternoon, and the reluctance that made Schramm's offer so welcome in 1966 has not entirely gone. The night slot lets the league offer the holiday to clubs that want it without having to impose it on those that do not.
That reasoning is commercially sound. As a matter of competitive fairness it is weaker, and the league has never really pretended otherwise.
The Thanksgiving games people still bring up
A handful of holiday games have outlived their seasons. Three of them come up nearly every year on the broadcasts.
| Year | Game | Score | What is remembered |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1934 | Bears at Lions | Bears 19-16 | The first Detroit Thanksgiving game, sold out and on national radio |
| 1962 | Packers at Lions | Lions 26-14 | Bart Starr sacked eleven times; Green Bay's only loss of the year |
| 1974 | Washington at Cowboys | Cowboys 24-23 | Rookie Clint Longley's comeback in relief of Roger Staubach |
| 1993 | Dolphins at Cowboys | Dolphins 16-14 | Leon Lett touches a blocked field goal in the snow |
| 1998 | Steelers at Lions | Lions 19-16, overtime | The disputed overtime coin toss |
| 2006 | Broncos at Chiefs | Chiefs 19-10 | The first night game |
1962: eleven sacks of Bart Starr
Vince Lombardi's Packers arrived at Tiger Stadium 10-0 and defending champions. They had beaten Detroit 9-7 in Green Bay in October on a late field goal, after a Lions interception that the Detroit defense blamed on its own offense and did not forget.
What followed is still called the Thanksgiving Day Massacre. The Detroit front, led by Roger Brown and Alex Karras, got to Starr eleven times for more than a hundred yards in losses, and Brown tackled him in the end zone for a safety. The Lions led 26-0 before Green Bay scored twice late. Sacks were not an official statistic until 1982, so the eleven is a count from the film and the play-by-play, but nobody has disputed it. The Packers did not lose again and won the title at 13-1.
1974: Clint Longley
Dallas trailed Washington 16-3 in the third quarter at Texas Stadium when Roger Staubach was knocked out of the game. His replacement was a rookie from Abilene Christian who had not taken a regular-season snap.
Longley threw a touchdown pass to Billy Joe DuPree, led a second scoring drive, and then, trailing 23-17 with under a minute left, threw 50 yards to Drew Pearson for the winning score with 28 seconds on the clock. Guard Blaine Nye called it "a triumph of the uncluttered mind," which remains the best thing a lineman has said about a quarterback. His Dallas career was brief, and that afternoon is nearly all of it.
1993: Leon Lett in the snow
An ice storm had left Texas Stadium's field white, a strange sight in Irving. Dallas led Miami 14-13 with 15 seconds to play when Pete Stoyanovich's 41-yard field goal attempt was blocked.
The rule is the whole story. A blocked field goal that crosses the line of scrimmage and has not been touched by the defense beyond the line belongs to the defense when it stops. All the Cowboys had to do was leave the ball alone. Lett, a defensive tackle, ran toward it, slid on the ice and kicked it. That touch made it a live ball. Miami recovered at the 1-yard line with three seconds left, Stoyanovich kicked a 19-yarder, and the Dolphins won 16-14. Dallas won the Super Bowl that season anyway, which is the only reason Lett is remembered with affection.
The 1998 overtime coin toss in Detroit, and what it changed
Pittsburgh and Detroit finished regulation tied 16-16 at the Silverdome on November 26, 1998. Overtime then was sudden death in the plainest sense: the first team to score won, and a team that won the toss and kicked a field goal ended the game without the other side touching the ball.
So the toss mattered enormously, and this one went wrong in front of a national audience.
- Regulation endsPittsburgh and Detroit are tied 16-16. Under the overtime rule of the time, the first score of any kind wins.
- The callReferee Phil Luckett tosses the coin. Under the procedure then in use, Steelers captain Jerome Bettis calls it while the coin is in the air.
- The disputeLuckett announces the call as heads. The coin lands tails. Bettis insists he called tails.
- The rulingLuckett says he heard the start of heads first and that the first call stands. Detroit gets the ball.
- The resultThe Lions drive into range and Jason Hanson kicks a 42-yard field goal. Detroit wins 19-16 and Pittsburgh never has a possession.
- The changeWithin days the league alters the procedure for every game: the call is made before the coin is tossed and is confirmed before the flip.
The sequence of events at the Pontiac Silverdome on November 26, 1998, and the procedural change the league made in the days that followed.
The audio from the field microphone suggests Bettis began one word and finished another, something like "hea-tails." Luckett applied the standing instruction that a referee goes with the first thing he hears. Bettis has always maintained he said tails. Both accounts can be true at once, and that was the flaw in the procedure. A call made in the half-second a coin is in the air, in a loud stadium, with a game riding on it, leaves no time to confirm anything.
The league fixed it before the next weekend's games. Since then the visiting captain has made the call before the referee tosses the coin, the referee repeats the call aloud, and a second official stands by to confirm it. The current procedure is set out in full in our guide to the NFL coin toss rules.
The larger problem took longer. A game decided by a coin and a single field goal drive was unsatisfying whoever called what, and the overtime rule itself was rewritten in stages from 2010 onward so that a field goal on the opening possession no longer ends the game. That history is in our explainer on how NFL overtime works. The Thanksgiving toss was not the cause of those changes by itself. It was the exhibit people reached for whenever the subject came up.
Turkey legs and turducken: John Madden's Thanksgiving
For a generation of viewers the voice of the holiday was John Madden's. He called 20 Thanksgiving games as a network analyst between 1981 and 2001, and somewhere in the middle of that run he turned the postgame interview into a ritual.
It began in 1989, when he handed a turkey drumstick on camera to Philadelphia's Reggie White as the best player in that afternoon's game at Dallas. The turkey leg award was born, and with it a difficulty Madden enjoyed pointing out: a bird has two legs, and a good offensive line has five men. A Texas barbecue cook solved it by building a turkey with six legs for the broadcast. In 1997 Madden added the turducken, a Louisiana preparation in which a boned chicken is stuffed inside a boned duck inside a boned turkey, and carved it on air with his hands.
He got to those games by road. Madden had given up flying in 1979, and from the late 1980s he crossed the country in a customized bus known as the Madden Cruiser, so a Thursday assignment in Dallas or Detroit meant several days of highway from wherever he had worked the previous Sunday. For nearly all of that run his broadcast partner was Pat Summerall, first on one network and then on another.
It was silly, and it worked because Madden meant it. He thought linemen never got anything, and a drumstick eaten on the field in full pads was his way of putting them on television.
Madden died on December 28, 2021. Beginning with the 2022 season the league has staged the holiday under the name the John Madden Thanksgiving Celebration. Each of the three broadcasts names a Madden Player of the Game, with a donation made in the winner's name to a youth or high school football program. The fields and uniforms carry a tribute mark, and the coin tosses use a commemorative coin that bears his likeness. The turkey legs have been handed out again too, by broadcasters who grew up watching him do it.
The holiday spreading outward: Black Friday and Thanksgiving Eve
For most of the tradition's life, the NFL's holiday was a single day. In the last few years it has become most of a week.
- Sunday beforeEvery team due to play on the holiday plays its normal Sunday game, which is what makes the week short.
- Wednesday nightA Thanksgiving Eve game, scheduled for the first time in 2026, with no fixed host.
- Thursday, early afternoonThe Detroit game, the oldest of the windows.
- Thursday, late afternoonThe Dallas game.
- Thursday nightThe third game, between two teams the league selects.
- Friday afternoonThe Black Friday game, played since 2023, kicking off in mid-afternoon Eastern time.
The holiday-week windows as they stood on the 2026 schedule. Only the Thursday games in Detroit and Dallas have permanent hosts.
The Black Friday game came first. On November 24, 2023, Miami beat the New York Jets 34-13 at MetLife Stadium in the first NFL game played on the day after Thanksgiving. It kicked off at 3:00 p.m. Eastern, and the hour was not an accident. Federal law protects high school and college football from competing professional telecasts on Friday nights and Saturdays through the fall, a restriction explained in our guide to why the NFL stays off Saturdays. An afternoon kickoff keeps the game on the right side of that line.
The Friday game belongs to the league's streaming package, has no fixed host, and has been played each year since.
The newest piece is the night before. The 2026 schedule placed a game on Thanksgiving Eve for the first time, Green Bay at the Los Angeles Rams on Wednesday, November 25. Wednesday games have been rare in the modern NFL, and this one extends the holiday run to five games across three days.
The pattern is the same one the league has followed with its Christmas Day games: find a day when the country is at home, test a game on it, and keep the game if people watch. Thanksgiving was the proof that the approach works. The additions around it are the league applying a lesson it learned from Detroit in 1934.
Football on Thanksgiving before it was a fixture
The NFL did not invent the pairing. By the time the league existed, Thanksgiving football was half a century old.
The college game, from 1876
Yale and Princeton met on Thanksgiving Day in 1876, in Hoboken, New Jersey, a few years after the first intercollegiate game. The eastern colleges that governed the sport soon made the holiday the date of their championship game, and by the 1880s and 1890s it was being played in New York City before some of the largest crowds American sport had seen. Newspapers treated it as a social event as much as a contest. Churches complained that it was emptying their Thanksgiving services.
The habit spread west and down through the school system. The University of Michigan played on Thanksgiving in most seasons from 1885 to 1905, often in Chicago. High schools across the country adopted the day for their rivalry games, and many still play them. When professional football arrived, the holiday was already a football day and had been for longer than anyone playing could remember.
The league's first season, 1920
The American Professional Football Association, which became the National Football League two years later, played its first season in 1920. On Thanksgiving, November 25, several of its teams were in action. Akron beat Canton 7-0 on the way to the first league title. The Decatur Staleys, who would move to Chicago and become the Bears, beat the Chicago Tigers 6-0. The story of that first season, and of the meeting in a Canton automobile showroom that preceded it, is told in our guide to when the NFL was founded.
Through the 1920s holiday games were common and unorganized. Teams scheduled them because a day off work meant a gate. No club had a claim on the date.
Red Grange, 1925
The most important Thanksgiving game of the early years ended 0-0. Harold "Red" Grange of the University of Illinois was the most famous football player in the country and one of the most famous athletes of any kind. He played his last college game on a Saturday in November 1925, signed with the Chicago Bears the next day, and made his professional debut that Thursday, Thanksgiving, against the Chicago Cardinals at Cubs Park.
A crowd reported at 36,000 turned out, far beyond what the pro game normally drew. The Cardinals' Paddy Driscoll spent the afternoon punting away from Grange and nobody scored. It hardly mattered. The Bears then took Grange on a barnstorming tour that filled major-league ballparks, and the professional game, which many had regarded as a slightly disreputable cousin of the college one, had its first proof that it could draw a crowd of its own.
What the record skips: Detroit's missing years and the AFL's holiday games
Two pieces of the history tend to drop out of the short version.
1939 to 1944
The Lions did not host on Thanksgiving for six seasons, and the usual explanation, the war, covers only part of it.
The gap begins in 1939. That year President Franklin Roosevelt moved Thanksgiving a week earlier in the hope of lengthening the Christmas shopping season. The decision was announced late and was bitterly unpopular. Some states observed the new date, some kept the old one and a few took both, and the confusion lasted until Congress fixed the holiday on the fourth Thursday of November beginning in 1942. For a sports league trying to schedule a holiday game months ahead, a holiday whose date differed from state to state was a poor foundation. Richards sold the Lions in 1940, which removed the tradition's inventor from the scene as well.
Then came the war, with travel restrictions and rosters depleted by military service, and the league scheduled no Thanksgiving games at all during the war years. Detroit's game returned in 1945, against the Cleveland Rams, and has been played every year since. The continuous run that people usually mean when they say the Lions "always" host is the one that starts there.
The other league's Thanksgiving
From 1960 through 1969 the American Football League played its own Thanksgiving games in competition with the NFL's. The first was in New York on November 24, 1960, when the Titans beat the Dallas Texans 41-35 at the Polo Grounds. The AFL never settled on a permanent host. Its holiday games moved among its cities, with Kansas City taking a home date in each of the league's last three seasons.
When the two leagues completed their merger in 1970, the combined NFL kept two holiday games, one in Detroit and one in Dallas. The former AFL clubs could appear as visitors and could not host. That is the grievance Lamar Hunt carried for 36 years, and it is why the first night game in 2006 was played in Kansas City. How the leagues came together, and what each side gave up, is covered in our history of the AFL-NFL merger.
The day's schedule, then, is a set of historical accidents that hardened. A radio man needed a crowd in 1934. A general manager wanted a television audience in 1966. An owner who had been shut out kept asking until 2006. The rest of the calendar is built by formula and computer, and more of our guides to how it works are collected on the USA hub. Thanksgiving is the part that was built by people asking for something and not letting go of it.