Why do the Dallas Cowboys play every Thanksgiving?
By Adam Carlson
Why do the Dallas Cowboys get scheduled for Thanksgiving every year?
The NFL is a great sport that has worldwide popularity, but it wasn’t always that way. In fact, the sport was still working to gain popularity and exposure in 1966. At the time, a young franchise was willing to do almost anything to get some national attention, including playing on a national holiday.
Games being played on Thanksgiving wasn’t something new to football. It had long been a tradition for college sports, with NCAA teams such as Yale, Princeton, and Michigan scheduling games for the holiday and having good results. In fact, Michigan’s games against the Chicago Maroons in the 1890s are considered to be “The Beginning of Thanksgiving Day Football.”
Tex Schramm was the general manager for the Dallas Cowboys a the time when games on Thanksgiving were a new occurrence for the National Football League. The team was struggling badly under head coach Tom Landry and the franchise was one of the more obscure teams in the league. Schramm saw an opportunity for Cowboys to get a primetime game by offering to play on the holiday when other squads were declining.
Thanksgiving games usually received great ratings on television, but the NFL was concerned that fans wouldn’t show up to watch professional football live the way the did for college sports. The league’s concerns were valid, as the holiday is all about getting together with your loved ones and celebrating family and friends over a great meal. In fact, the NFL was so sure that nobody would show live to games that they offered teams a flat monetary rate to make up for the lack of fans in the stands.
The NFL couldn’t have been more wrong. Fans not only attended the game, but they packed the Cotton Bowl. The game between the Dallas Cowboys and Cleveland Browns broke attendance records, cramming 80,259 bodies into the stadium to watch the game, which Dallas won 26-14.
Since then, the Cowboys have seen Thanksgiving as a nod to their winning history and a decision that helped make the franchise one of the most popular and visible in the NFL. Dallas has only missed playing on the holiday twice since the tradition started, and now it has become standard for the first two teams to host games on Thanksgiving, the Cowboys and Detroit Lions, to continue that tradition and host a game each year.
Playing on Thanksgiving seems to be a tradition which has no end in sight for Dallas, which makes watching the Cowboys play football a reliable part of your holiday plans.