What Sports Fans Should Be Thankful for This Thanksgiving

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Don’t forget to cook your turkey low and slow this Thursday—and if you get into trouble, there’s always the Butterball hotline.

Happy Thanksgiving! I hope your weekend is full of as much football as is appropriate for your family. We’ve got a shorter newsletter today, but we’ll start with several reasons sports fans should be thankful for this Thanksgiving, and close with a little Thanksgiving football history.

It’s tough to admit, but as a sports fan I sometimes get a little overwhelmed by all the action I’m trying to keep up with. This weekend it was the NFL, college football, Formula 1, F1 Academy, Premier League soccer, and the National Women’s Soccer League title game—with a little bit of college hockey, NHL, and the PGA Tour on the side. But whenever I get overwhelmed, I also feel thankful: I think back a few short years ago to the beginning of the pandemic, when all we had to watch for two months was classic replays, online racing simulators, documentaries, and marble races.

We’ve come a long way in the last five years, and have even more to watch now than we used to. Live sports are the absolute hottest commodity in TV, and major events are cultural cornerstones. More and more leagues are starting up, confident they can turn a profit off our attention (just look at the ability of the United Football League, TGL (TMRW Golf League), and Unrivaled women’s basketball to make it past their first seasons).

Capitalism has blessed us with the ability to watch almost any game we want, whenever we want, and wherever we are. If you want to stream the second half of North Dakota against Hawaii in basketball at 1 a.m. while you ride the night bus to New York City, you can do that thanks to the ESPN app and a monthly subscription.

We even get to watch and play sports on holidays. Thanksgiving and football go hand in hand. Turkey trot 5Ks are on the rise. The NBA dominated Christmas until the NFL came along, while college football gets to dominate New Year’s Day. And everyone in the family gathers around the TV after dinner on Christmas Eve to watch the Hawaii Bowl (OK, maybe that’s just my brothers).

Even if we can’t be thankful for the current state of our favorite teams, we can be thankful for the memories we’ve created because of them, the connections to family and friends that they’ve fostered, and the hope they give us that glory is always around the corner.

Speaking of being thankful, everyone who likes watching football on Thanksgiving can express thanks to my Detroit Lions. “The Lions weren’t the first team to play on Thanksgiving, and football on Thanksgiving didn’t even start with professionals,” I wrote in 2020 for the Washington Examiner. “But the Lions did bring Thanksgiving football to the masses.”

It started in 1934, their first season in Detroit. Owner George Richards also owned a major radio station in Detroit. “Knowing the publicity potential of radio, Richards along with NBC Radio, set up a 94-station network to broadcast the Lions-Bears showdown,” the Pro Football Hall of Fame says. It was a huge game too, with the Lions coming in at 10-1 and the Bears undefeated.

Unfortunately, like most of their Thanksgiving games, the Lions did not prevail. But a major tradition was born. (The Cowboys didn’t join the feast until 1966, and they took a couple years off in the ’70s.)

When the Lions were bad (year after year, after year after year, after year after year), there was a lot of moaning from football fans about the hapless, mismanaged Lions getting such a great time slot. But as CBS’ Jim Nantz once told Sports Illustrated, “The ratings are probably going to be the same no matter what the matchup was in that window….The ratings will not plummet. It’s just part of the Thanksgiving tradition.” For example, as I noted in that Examiner piece, the 2019 game was one of the league’s top-five most-viewed games that year, even though it had a bad Lions team playing a bad Bears team. Neither was a playoff hopeful.

What’s surprising is that the NFL put the Packers in the Thanksgiving game this year against the Lions, along with the Chiefs against the Cowboys. They could have put the Lions or Cowboys up against awful teams, and for TV purposes it wouldn’t have mattered because the game gets great ratings no matter who’s playing.

For that time-honored tradition, you can thank the Lions.

As much as I would love to just post “North London is red” and leave it at that, you can all laugh at UCLA instead.

UCLA tried a blind pitch fake FG and it worked about as well as you’d expect pic.twitter.com/YhpQXRzHij

— CJ Fogler ???? (@cjzero) November 23, 2025

That’s all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the weekend, Michigan State against Stanford in the NCAA Women’s Soccer Tournament quarterfinals.