The Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys always play on Thanksgiving because both franchises voluntarily turned the holiday into a marketing showcase decades ago, and the NFL later locked that into tradition as a permanent feature of the schedule.

How the Lions Started It

  • In 1934, new Lions owner and radio executive George A. Richards moved the team from Portsmouth to Detroit and needed a way to stand out in a city that already loved the baseball Tigers.
  • He scheduled a special Thanksgiving Day game against the powerhouse Chicago Bears and arranged for a nationwide NBC radio broadcast to drum up attention.
  • The stunt worked: the game sold out around 26,000 seats weeks in advance and could have sold tens of thousands more, so the NFL kept putting Detroit on Thanksgiving and it became an annual tradition (except during World War II from 1939–1944).

How the Cowboys Joined In

  • The Cowboys were an expansion team in 1960 and initially struggled to draw big crowds or national interest despite being in a huge football state.
  • In 1966, general manager Tex Schramm asked the league to give Dallas a Thanksgiving game to boost exposure, knowing it would be nationally televised.
  • Over 80,000 fans showed up at the Cotton Bowl for that first Thanksgiving game, it was a ratings success, and Dallas quickly became associated with the holiday just like Detroit.

Why It’s Still These Two Teams

  • The NFL eventually formalized Thanksgiving around three games: the early game hosted by Detroit, the late afternoon game hosted by Dallas, and a rotating third prime-time matchup.
  • Other teams do play on Thanksgiving now, but the hosting rights for the daytime games are essentially “grandfathered” to the Lions and Cowboys because of their historical role in building the holiday audience.
  • At this point it is less about competitive merit and more about long-standing tradition, consistent TV ratings, and the holiday feeling “off” to many fans without seeing those two franchises on the schedule.

Quick Forum-Style Take

The simple answer fans toss around is:
“The Lions begged for attention in the 1930s, the Cowboys did the same in the ’60s, it worked, the TV numbers went crazy, and now we’re stuck—in a good way—with tradition.”

TL;DR: The Lions started Thanksgiving games in 1934 as a publicity play, the Cowboys joined in 1966 for the same reason, and the NFL kept giving them those slots because the combination of tradition, ratings, and national exposure became too valuable to change.

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