The Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys play on Thanksgiving because each franchise once volunteered for those games as a marketing move, and the NFL kept giving them the holiday slots until it became a longā€‘running tradition.

Origins with the Lions

  • In 1934, new Lions owner George A. Richards moved the team to Detroit and struggled to draw fans against the more popular Tigers baseball team.
  • Richards asked the NFL to schedule a special Thanksgiving game against the Chicago Bears, paired it with a nationwide NBC radio broadcast, and it sold outā€”far exceeding expectations, so the league kept giving Detroit that holiday home game almost every year afterward (except during World War II).

How the Cowboys joined in

  • The Cowboys were added to Thanksgiving much later, in 1966, when general manager Tex Schramm pushed hard for a Thanksgiving game to boost the young franchiseā€™s visibility and TV exposure.
  • The first Cowboys Thanksgiving game at the Cotton Bowl drew around 80,000 fans and strong TV numbers, convincing the league to lock Dallas into that afternoon slot as a yearly showcase.

Why it continues today

  • Both teams now ā€œownā€ a traditional Thanksgiving home window: the Lions in the early game and the Cowboys in the late afternoon, while a rotating matchup usually fills the primeā€‘time slot.
  • The NFL keeps this setup because the holiday games are ratings monsters, families expect to see Detroit and Dallas every year, and the continuity has become a core part of the Thanksgiving football identity.

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