Since its inception in 1920, the National Football League (NFL) has played games on Thanksgiving Day, patterned upon the historic playing of college football games on or around the November holiday. The NFL's Thanksgiving Day games have traditionally included one game hosted by the Detroit Lions since 1934 and one game hosted by the Dallas Cowboys since 1966 (with two exceptions in 1975 and 1977). Since 2006, a third game has also been played in prime time on Thanksgiving night. Unlike the two afternoon games, this game has no fixed teams.

In 2001, the NFL began branding the games as the Thanksgiving Classic. In 2022, the league changed the branding to the John Madden Thanksgiving Celebration in honor of former head coach and broadcaster John Madden, who died in December 2021.

The NFL's Thanksgiving games are regularly the league's most-watched regular-season games. All three of the games played in 2025 set NFL regular-season viewership records; the Kansas City Chiefs–Dallas Cowboys game broadcast on CBS and streamer Paramount+ stands as the most-watched NFL regular season game of all time (57.2 million viewers).

History Before the NFL

The concept of American football games being played on Thanksgiving Day dates back to 1876, shortly after the game had been invented, as it was a day that most people were off work. In that year, the college football teams at Yale and Princeton began an annual tradition of playing each other on Thanksgiving Day. The University of Michigan also made it a tradition to play annual Thanksgiving games, holding 19 such games from 1885 to 1905. The Thanksgiving Day games between Michigan and the Chicago Maroons in the 1890s have been cited as "The Beginning of Thanksgiving Day Football." In some areas, most commonly in New England, high school teams play on Thanksgiving, typically to wrap up the regular season.

By the time football had become a professional event, playing on Thanksgiving had already become an institution. Records of pro football being played on Thanksgiving date back to as early as the 1890s, with the first pro–am team, the Allegheny Athletic Association of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1902, the National Football League, a Major League Baseball-backed organization based entirely in Pennsylvania and unrelated to the current NFL, attempted to settle its championship over Thanksgiving weekend. After the game ended in a tie, all three teams in the league eventually claimed to have won the title.

Members of the Ohio League, during its early years, usually placed their marquee matchups on Thanksgiving Day. For instance, in 1905 and 1906, the Latrobe Athletic Association and Canton Bulldogs, considered at the time to be two of the best teams in professional football (along with the Massillon Tigers), played on Thanksgiving. A rigging scandal with the Tigers leading up to the 1906 game resulted in severe drops in attendance for the Bulldogs and ultimately caused their suspension of operations.

In the 1910s, the Ohio League stopped holding Thanksgiving games because many of its players coached high school teams and were unavailable. This was not the case in other regional circuits. In 1919, the New York Pro Football League featured a Thanksgiving matchup between the Buffalo Prospects and the Rochester Jeffersons. The game ended in a scoreless tie, leading to a rematch the next Sunday for the league championship.

The pioneer NFL and Thanksgiving Day games

Several other NFL teams played regularly on Thanksgiving in the first eighteen years of the league, including the Chicago Bears and Chicago Cardinals (1922–1933; the Bears played the Lions from 1934 to 1938 while the Cardinals switched to the Green Bay Packers for 1934 and 1935), Frankford Yellow Jackets, Pottsville Maroons, Buffalo All-Americans, Canton Bulldogs (even after the team moved to Cleveland they played the 1924 Thanksgiving game in Canton), and the New York Giants (1929–1938, who always played a crosstown rival).

The first owner of the Lions, George A. Richards, started the tradition of the Thanksgiving Day game as a gimmick to get people to go to Lions football games, and to continue a tradition begun by the city's previous NFL teams. What differentiated the Lions' efforts from other teams which played on the holiday was that Richards owned radio station WJR, a major affiliate of the NBC Blue Network (the forerunner to today's American Broadcasting Company); he was able to negotiate an agreement with NBC to carry his Thanksgiving games live across the network.

During the Franksgiving controversy in 1939 and 1940, the only two teams to play the game were the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles, as both teams were in the same state (Pennsylvania). (At the time, then-U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt wanted to move the holiday for economic reasons and many states were resistant to the move; half the states recognized the move and the other half did not. This complicated scheduling for Thanksgiving games. Incidentally, the two teams were also exploring the possibility of a merger at the time.See also: Pennsylvania Keystoners) Due to the looming World War II and the resulting shorter seasons, the NFL did not schedule any Thanksgiving games in 1941, nor did it schedule any in the subsequent years until the war ended in 1945. When the Thanksgiving games resumed in 1945, only the Lions' annual home game would remain on the Thanksgiving holiday.

The All-America Football Conference and American Football League, both of which would later be absorbed into the NFL, also held Thanksgiving contests, although neither of those leagues had permanent hosts. Likewise, the AFL of 1926 also played two Thanksgiving games in its lone season of existence, while the AFL of 1936 hosted one in its first season, which featured the Cleveland Rams, a future NFL team, and the 1940–41 incarnation of the American Football League played two games in 1940 on the earlier "Franksgiving" date.

The late 20th century

In 1951, the Packers began a 13-season run as the perpetual opponent to the Lions each year through 1963. This pairing became popularly known as the "Yooper Bowl", since the boundary between the two teams' regional territories and fanbases runs through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, whose denizens are known as "yoopers".Hough, Lucy (3 November 2020). "Peninsula Divided: Packers vs. Lions". www.awesomemitten.com. Retrieved 2022-01-13. Archived September 26, 2020 and January 22, 2022 at the Wayback Machine.

In 1966, the Dallas Cowboys, who had been founded six years earlier, adopted the practice of hosting Thanksgiving games. It is widely rumored that the Cowboys sought a guarantee that they would regularly host Thanksgiving games as a condition of their very first one (since games on days other than Sunday were uncommon at the time and thus high attendance was not a certainty).

This is only partly true: Dallas had in fact decided on their own to host games on Thanksgiving; team president Tex Schramm was enticed by the publicity that would come with a permanent nationally televised contest and volunteered to be host when the NFL proposed the second Thanksgiving game. Schramm also anticipated a home field advantage in that the shorter week would favor the home team because the opponent would not only lose three days of practice but additional time traveling to Dallas that the Cowboys could use to prepare.

In 1975 and 1977, at the behest of then-Commissioner Pete Rozelle, the St. Louis Cardinals replaced Dallas as a host team (Dallas then hosted St. Louis in 1976). Although the Cardinals, at the time known as the "Cardiac Cards" due to their propensity for winning very close games, were a modest success at the time, they were nowhere near as popular nationwide as the Cowboys, who were regular Super Bowl contenders during this era. This, combined with St. Louis's consistently weak attendance, a series of ugly Cardinals losses in the three-game stretch, and opposition from the Kirkwood–Webster Groves Turkey Day Game (a local high school football contest) led to Dallas resuming regular hosting duties in 1978.

With their resumption as a regular NFL Thanksgiving Day venue, the Cowboys requested and received an agreement guaranteeing the Cowboys a spot on Thanksgiving Day indefinitely.

Since 1978, Thanksgiving games have been hosted in Detroit and Dallas every year, with Detroit in the early time slot and Dallas in the late afternoon slot. Due to television network commitments in place through the 2013 season, to make sure that both the AFC-carrying network (NBC from 1965 to 1997, and CBS since 1998) and the NFC-carrying network (CBS from 1956 to 1993, and Fox since 1994) got at least one game each, one of these games was between NFC opponents, and one featured AFC-NFC opponents. Thus, the AFC could showcase only one team on Thanksgiving, and the AFC team was always the visiting team.

The 21st century

Since 2006, a third NFL game on Thanksgiving has been played in prime time. It originally aired on NFL Network, serving as the launch of its Thursday Night Football package. In 2012, the game moved to NBC as part of the league's new television deals. The night game has never had a dedicated host team or any conference tie-in, meaning the league can place any game into the time slot. Since NBC took over the prime time game in 2012, divisional matchups have been normally scheduled, with the exceptions being in 2016, 2021, 2022 and 2024. In 2014, a series of changes to the broadcast contracts freed CBS from its obligation to carry an AFC team, and by 2018, the last vestiges of conference ties to the Thanksgiving games were eliminated (although in practice games on Fox have remained all-NFC contests).

The originally scheduled 2020 primetime game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Pittsburgh Steelers was postponed to the following Wednesday, December 2, after multiple Ravens players and staff tested positive for COVID-19 in the days before the game. This thus marked the first time no primetime contest was held since 2005.

On November 11, 2022, the league announced that the Thanksgiving games would be branded as the "John Madden Thanksgiving Celebration", honoring the memory of head coach and broadcaster John Madden. Madden called 20 Thanksgiving games as the lead analyst for CBS Sports from 1981 to 1993 and Fox Sports from 1994 to 2001.

From 2014 to 2025, the Thursday Night Football game after Thanksgiving always featured two teams who were scheduled to play on Thanksgiving. Most of the TNF after Thanksgiving games have featured the Cowboys, although the Lions have also been scheduled thrice as well (in and against the Packers, and in against the Cowboys). During this period, the only TNF after Thanksgiving game not to feature either the Cowboys or the Lions took place in , when the NFL scheduled the Buffalo Bills at the New England Patriots instead. In , the NFL changed course as it scheduled the Kansas City Chiefs at the Los Angeles Rams as the TNF game after Thanksgiving. While the Chiefs were scheduled to play on the primetime Thanksgiving game, the Rams were assigned to play in the NFL's first Thanksgiving Eve game. Since the institution of permanent Christmas games into the NFL schedule in 2024, many of the teams scheduled for Thanksgiving have also been required to play the Christmas game as well; Detroit, Dallas and Kansas City played both holidays in 2025, while Buffalo and Chicago were scheduled for both in 2026. The NFL dismissed criticism of the scheduling practices: "Fans vote with their remotes."