Thanksgiving Football: Was Anyone Actually Excited To Watch?

Thanksgiving day: High-School football, seeing relatives that you are annoyed by but put up with just for one day, stuffing yourself with turkey and mashed potatoes, and sitting around the biggest TV you can find to watch some NFL action.

Not this year.

No, this time around, my younger cousins actually played a board game instead of watching the Cowboys and Seahawks. The aunts and uncles watched Family Guy. What a change from the years of ooh-ing and ahh-ing over the nerve-wracking fourth quarter finishes and playoff hopes put on the line on Thanksgiving day.

The point is this: When the winless Lions play the one-win Titans on Thanksgiving, nobody cares. Not even Tennessee fans, and certainly not Detroit fans. Why would one want to see Daunte Culpepper throw a pick-six to a defensive end, or a fullback rumble right past a corner for a big gain?

Having such uneven matchups on Thanksgiving day ruins the tradition of turkey day football. It would be better to break the tradition of showing the Lions at home every year rather than show them losing miserably.

At my high school's game, there was better quarterback play from our senior starter than Daunte Culpepper and Matt Hasselbeck combined. There was more excitement and energy from the bleachers and fence line surrounding our track and football field when our smallest wideout, passionately called "Juice Box", ran a beautiful 22-yard end around for a score, than when Tony Romo added more points to the lead with a pass to T.O.

The NFL has to restore the spirit of the family crowding around to watch big games with playoff implications on the line. They need to adapt the flexible schedule to plan for highly- competitive, exciting games to take place at noon and four o'clock on Thanksgiving.

The one game slated to be a good one, the Cardinals and Eagles, turned out to be an Eagles blowout. But that is ok, because at least it had the potential to be a good game. Detroit-Tennessee and Dallas-Seattle had no potential to be anything more than what they were: boring, one-sided, and energy-less.

Please, NFL schedulers. Break the Detroit tradition for once. Or least have the Lions play the Cowboys, so we get one better game. I want it to be like it used to be, because watching little kids play Scattergories is not the same as watching them filled with excitement after a game winning, 80-yard touchdown pass with seven seconds left in the game.