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why do lions and cowboys play on thanksgiving

The Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys play every Thanksgiving because both franchises deliberately turned the holiday into a permanent marketing and TV tradition that the NFL kept in place once it became hugely popular.

Origin of the Lions on Thanksgiving

  • In 1934, new Lions owner George A. Richards scheduled a Thanksgiving game to boost interest in his struggling team, which was competing with the far more popular Detroit Tigers for local attention.
  • He used a radio network he owned to promote and broadcast the game nationally, it sold out, turned away thousands, and the NFL kept giving Detroit a Thanksgiving slot almost every year after, pausing only during World War II.

How the Cowboys Joined the Tradition

  • The Cowboys’ Thanksgiving tradition started in 1966, when general manager Tex Schramm volunteered the team for a Thanksgiving game to gain national publicity and build the fan base for what was then a relatively new and not-yet-huge franchise.
  • The game drew massive attendance and TV audiences, proving the idea worked, so the league essentially locked Dallas into a recurring Thanksgiving home game, with only a couple of exceptions in the 1970s.

Why It Stuck: Tradition and TV

  • Thanksgiving Day football became a ratings powerhouse: fans are home, families gather around the TV, and the Lions at early kickoff plus the Cowboys in the later slot turned into a built‑in national showcase for both teams.
  • Because it reliably delivers audiences and has become part of how many people in the U.S. experience the holiday (turkey, family, Lions early, Cowboys later), the NFL has kept those teams as the “hosts” while rotating their opponents and adding a prime‑time night game for variety.

In Short

  • The Lions play on Thanksgiving because a 1930s marketing gamble in Detroit worked so well it became a league tradition.
  • The Cowboys play on Thanksgiving because they asked for the spotlight in the 1960s, turned it into huge crowds and TV exposure, and the NFL never took that showcase away.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.