American football is one of the many traditions in American culture that is associated with Thanksgiving Day. Virtually every level of football, from amateur and high school to college and the NFL (including the CFL on Canadian Thanksgiving), plays football on Thanksgiving Day (Thursday) or the immediately following holiday weekend (Friday, Saturday, and Sunday).
History The first Thanksgiving Day football game took place in Philadelphia, on Thanksgiving Day of 1869, less than two weeks after Rutgers defeated Princeton in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in what is widely recognized as the first intercollegiate football game in the United States, and only six years after Abraham Lincoln declared the first fixed national Thanksgiving holiday in 1863.
On November 17, 1869, the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph published the following announcement: "Foot Ball: A foot-ball match between twenty-two players of the Young America Cricket Club and the Germantown Cricket Club will take place on Thanksgiving Day at 12 1/2 o'clock, on the grounds of the Germantown Club." The proximity of Philadelphia to both Rutgers and Princeton invites speculation that this game may have been played under similar rules and perhaps involved some of the same participants, or at least people familiar with the game played at Rutgers, and a second match at Princeton, earlier that month.
Princeton played Yale in the New York City area on Thanksgiving Day from 1876 through 1881. The Thanksgiving Day football game became an institutionalized fixture of organized football in 1882, when the Intercollegiate Football Association determined to hold an annual collegiate championship game in New York City on Thanksgiving Day between the two leading teams in the association. Previously, the 'Champion' was to be determined by a team's records over the entire season against all members of the association. For at least the three previous years, the championship had been a matter of dispute as a result of Yale and Princeton playing to scoreless ties on three Thanksgiving Day games in a row.
On November 25, 1897, American students of the École des Beaux-Arts and the Académie Julian played a game in Paris, France. This is considered the first American football game ever played in Europe.
The tradition of playing football games on Thanksgiving continues to the present-day. At the high school level, the tradition is declining rapidly as schools drop their Thanksgiving games and shorten their regular season in favor of playoff tournaments and allowing players to focus on winter sports such as basketball.
Professional football
Professional football teams and leagues have played on Thanksgiving from the start, with pro leagues and teams having played on Thanksgiving since the 1890s. It carried over when Buffalo and Rochester, two members of the New York Pro Football League (NYPFL) which had held its championship on Thanksgiving 1919, and the Ohio League, which traditionally held its marquee matchups on Thanksgiving, combined into the NFL upon its founding in 1920, and as such, the NFL has played on Thanksgiving ever since. The Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys have played home games on Thanksgiving since 1934 and 1966, respectively, in a traditional series of NFL games. Beginning in 2006, the NFL added a third game on Thanksgiving night with a rotating host team.Thanksgiving games official page at NFL.com. Retrieved July 21, 2011.
The rival American Football League also played on Thanksgiving in the 1960s, as did the All-America Football Conference in the 1940s and the original AFL in 1926.
In the Canadian Football League, where games are played on Canadian Thanksgiving, the CFL hosts two games in the Thanksgiving Day Classic; it is one of only two weeks each year in which the CFL plays on a Monday, the other being the Labour Day Classic. The difference between the Thanksgiving and Labour Day games is that the Thanksgiving Day games do not have the same matchups each year; however, like its American counterpart, one of the games has a regular host (in the CFL's case, the Montreal Alouettes). Coincidentally, both the Grey Cup, the CFL's championship game, and the Vanier Cup, the championship of Canadian college football, are both traditionally played on the fourth weekend in November, which amounts to the week before or the week after American Thanksgiving.
The World Football League originally planned to hold its 1974 championship game, World Bowl 1, the day after Thanksgiving in 1974; the business failures of the 1974 season led to the league reorganizing the playoff structure and pushing the World Bowl one week back (although the WFL regularly played on Thursdays during the regular season, it instead split its semifinals between the day before Thanksgiving and the day after). Had the United States Football League completed its move to autumn for the 1986 season, it would have played one of its games on Thanksgiving (a game featuring the Tampa Bay Bandits at the Memphis Showboats was scheduled for that night), but the league suspended operations prior to the season and, even if it had survived, the Bandits went bankrupt before the season would have been played. Similarly, the United Football League, which began play in 2009, held its first two UFL championship games over Thanksgiving weekend; both the truncated 2011 UFL season and the 2012 UFL season were cut short well before the Thanksgiving holiday due to financial shortfalls. The Fall Experimental Football League had scheduled its championship for the day before Thanksgiving Day 2014, in Brooklyn, but the game was cancelled after the season was shortened.
College football
Thanksgiving weekend historically marks the end of the college football regular season, before conference championships and bowl games begin play in December (the Army–Navy Game is the lone exception). Today, this is only true for the top-level NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision, where it has become a tradition to play a fierce rival on the last week of the regular season. At levels below the Bowl Subdivision, the NCAA begins its championship tournaments either on Thanksgiving weekend (for the Division I FCS championship) or the week before (in the cases of Divisions II and III; the NAIA, a separate body, also begins its tournament at that time). Other college football sanctioning bodies end their seasons well before Thanksgiving.
The University of Kansas and University of Missouri played the first of nineteen consecutive Thanksgiving Day football games in Kansas City, Missouri in 1892. After new conference rules that required all games to be played on college campuses, the Thanksgiving Day tradition was temporarily suspended in 1911, but then reinstituted in spurts starting in 1916 and continuing through the 1940s.
The University of Michigan 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 erroneously cited as "The Beginning of Thanksgiving Day Football." Since the Maroons no longer play at the Division I level, the Wolverines now play their modern-day archrivals, the Ohio State Buckeyes, during Thanksgiving weekend. Yale and Princeton began an annual tradition of playing against each other on Thanksgiving Day starting in 1876. From 1945 to 1956, the Burley Bowl pitted two small colleges against each other in an unofficial bowl game.
From 1894 to 1953, Case Tech Rough Riders and Western Reserve University Red Cats played each other on Thanksgiving, playing at Cleveland Stadium from the time of its opening in 1931. The two schools merged in 1970.
A college football game between Alabama State University and Tuskegee University, has been played on Thanksgiving Day annually from 1924 to 2012 and again since 2016; as such, it has historically been known as the "Turkey Day Classic". It is also the oldest black college football classic, since the two colleges first played each other in 1901. Tuskegee University pulled out of the contest after 2012 (they were replaced by Stillman College in the 2013 contest), and Alabama State did the same from 2013 to 2015, deciding to move its homecoming to the Saturday before Thanksgiving; in both cases, the NCAA football tournaments prompted the schools to move the end of their seasons to before Thanksgiving so that they would be able to compete for the national championship should they qualify. The establishment of the Celebration Bowl for historically black schools allowed the Turkey Day Classic to resume; it was held against conference rivals Mississippi Valley State and Prairie View A&M in 2018 and 2019, respectively. Another popular black college football classic played on Thanksgiving weekend is the Bayou Classic between Grambling State University and Southern University, which is held the Saturday after Thanksgiving; for the 2017 season only, because of a hurricane earlier in the season, the Labor Day Classic between Texas Southern and Prairie View A&M was played on Thanksgiving weekend, and the two teams voluntarily agreed to hold that Classic on the same weekend in 2018. Alabama State, Mississippi Valley State, Prairie View A&M, Texas Southern, Southern and Grambling are all members of the Southwestern Athletic Conference.
In 2024 and 2025, the American Athletic Conference held the rights to the lone Bowl Subdivision game on Thanksgiving, with both games hosted by the Memphis Tigers football squad. In contrast to most Thanksgiving weekend games that have featured fixed rivalries, the Tigers opted to rotate opponents in hopes of securing a quality matchup for the time slot: the 2024 game featured the Tigers against Tulane and the 2025 game will host Navy, both teams (along with Memphis) being in the upper echelon of the American standings at the time. For 2026, the West Texas Championship Saddle Trophy game between the Texas Tech Red Raiders and Texas Christian Horned Frogs, both of the Big 12 Conference, was chosen as the lone Bowl Subdivision game for Thanksgiving night.
Other prominent college football rivalries that take place over Thanksgiving weekend include:
Auburn Tigers vs. Alabama Crimson Tide (the Iron Bowl) Ole Miss Rebels vs. Mississippi State Bulldogs (the Battle of the Golden Egg, played on Thanksgiving night from 1998 to 2003 and 2017 to 2019) LSU Tigers vs. Arkansas Razorbacks (the Battle for the Golden Boot), through 2013 Arkansas has played Missouri on Thanksgiving weekend since 2014 Georgia Bulldogs vs. Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets (Clean, Old-Fashioned Hate) BYU Cougars vs. Utah Utes (the Holy War, to 2010, again in 2018) Colorado Buffaloes vs. Nebraska Cornhuskers (Colorado–Nebraska football rivalry, through 2010) Colorado Buffaloes vs. Utah Utes (Rumble in the Rockies, since 2011) Nebraska Cornhuskers vs. Iowa Hawkeyes (Heroes Game, since 2011) Oklahoma Sooners vs. Oklahoma State Cowboys (the Bedlam Series through until 2023) This game was played earlier in the season in 2017 and 2018 Texas Longhorns vs. Texas A&M Aggies (the Lone Star Showdown, played on Thanksgiving from 2008 until its end in 2011, resumed on Thanksgiving weekend in 2024, also played on Thanksgiving many other times prior to 2008) Until 2015, Texas hosted a game on Thanksgiving night every year; after the end of the Lone Star Showdown, Texas played against TCU (for the Chancellor's Spurs) in even-numbered years and against Texas Tech in odd-numbered years. Texas A&M played LSU during Thanksgiving week beginning in 2014 until 2023, with the game being played on Thanksgiving night in 2014 and 2016. (see also: LSU–Texas A&M football rivalry) LSU plays Oklahoma on Thanksgiving weekend starting in 2024 with the Sooners move to the SEC Florida Gators vs. Florida State Seminoles (the Sunshine Showdown)