The History of Thanksgiving Day Football Games

Video Transcript

"Hello, I'm Matt Cail and on behalf of Expert Village, I'm here today to tell you all about the history of Thanksgiving. Of course we also have the art of watching big football games on Thanksgiving. How did this start? Well actually it didn't start at the national or college level like you see nowadays, it started with high school, good old fashioned high school football games. Most of them in New England in the late 1800's, the 1880's to be precise, you had some really really big rivalries between different high schools that would play the big games on Thanksgiving Day. So they'd miss in some of the pigskin with the turkey on Thanksgiving Day and this would basically allow them to watch the games then go out and have really good food afterwards. Now this began to expand further on as you enter the twentieth century to the point where you had some of the larger professional franchises, specifically franchises located in Chicago and Detroit playing the big games starting on Thanksgiving. You still have a couple franchises which traditionally will have their, a game every single Thanksgiving on there, guaranteeing that there's plenty of big college match ups and professional match ups on Thanksgiving."