Thanksgiving football dates to at least 1876, when Yale defeated Princeton, 2-0, on a cold, bleak afternoon in Hoboken, New Jersey. By the 1890s, many college and high school teams played on the holiday. But the tradition didn't become a bonafide institution in professional football until 1934, when the Detroit Lions hosted the powerhouse Chicago Bears in a Thanksgiving game broadcast nationally.
The Lions and Bears Thanksgiving Day Game Is Born
In March 1934, Lions owner George A. Richards, a Detroit radio executive, headed a group that purchased the Portsmouth (Ohio) Spartans and moved the team to the Motor City. Eager to boost ticket sales and improve his team's profile in a city dominated by the Tigers, Richards persuaded Chicago Bears owner and coach George Halas to play on Thanksgiving morning. He also persuaded the 94-station NBC Radio Network to broadcast the game nationally.
Ticket sales spiked for the game between the 10-1 Lions and 11-0 Bears, who were led by future Hall of Famers Red Grange and Bronko Nagurski. A sellout crowd of roughly 26,000 fans attended the game at the University of Detroit Stadium—the largest crowd at the time to watch professional football in Detroit. Many more tickets could have been sold, and the national radio broadcast—an NFL first—was wildly popular.
"It was a masterful exhibition of offensive football," the Detroit Free Press noted in a Page 1 story on the defending NFL champion Bears' 19-16 win. "Two of the greatest lines in the game waged a fierce struggle to make way for dozen and more versatile backs who could plunge, pass, run and place-kick; dropkick, block and tackle."
Pro Football Hall of Fame historian Jon Kendle says the dramatic, well-played game was a major boost for the league. On their way to an NFL title the next season, the Lions defeated the Bears, 14-2, on Thanksgiving to clinch the Western Division title.
“[T]he fact that you had really good teams playing one another early on in this series helped bring the excitement to playing NFL games on that day," Kendle says. "I don’t know if the reach would have been as good or had the amount of staying power that it has had throughout the years had there been these really bad, really struggling teams playing each other on Thanksgiving."
Except from 1939-44 during World War II, the Lions have hosted a Thanksgiving game every year since 1934. The first nationally televised Thanksgiving game was the 1953 Green Bay Packers-Lions game, broadcast by the Dumont Television Network, one of the first commercial TV networks in the United States.