If you’re planning on watching football on Thanksgiving, you’ll have some extra time to spend before the first game starts this year.
For the first time in 43 years, the opening Thanksgiving game will not start at 12:30 p.m. ET. Instead, it is being pushed back 30 minutes. When the NFL schedule was revealed in May, one of the most notable changes was the decision to move the league’s opening game to 1 p.m. ET and that’s when the Detroit Lions and Green Bay Packers would be playing. Starting Thursday on Fox,
The Lions have hosted the opening game for decades and the last time it did not start at 12:30 p.m. ET was in 1982. During a strike-shortened season in which each team played just nine games, the Lions hosted the Giants in a game that started at 12 p.m. ET. In 1983, the game was moved to the 12:30 pm ET window and has remained there ever since.
If you’re wondering why the league decided to change a tradition that’s been going on for 42 years, Roger Goodell gave clarification Just before the schedule for that comes up.
“We’re probably going to move from a 12:30 p.m. ET start to a 1 p.m. ET start,” Goodell said. “We’ll go back to traditional windows.”
Originally, the NFL wanted to align the Thanksgiving kickoff window with the “traditional” kickoff window that the league uses on Sundays. NFL fans in the Pacific Time Zone are probably thrilled with the move because it means games will now start at 10 a.m. on Thursdays instead of 9:30 a.m. as before.
This is the first major change the NFL has made to its Thanksgiving schedule in 19 years. The last major change came in 2006 when the league decided to give us a Türkiye Day tripleheader by adding a prime time game that would start at 8:20 pm ET. this years, Prime time games will be available Joe Burrow returns to the field for the Bengals in a game against the Ravens.
Before the addition of the late game, the league only played doubleheaders on Thanksgiving, with the Lions always hosting the early game and the Dallas Cowboys hosting the late afternoon game. Of course, the Cowboys will host a showdown with the Kansas City Chiefs once again this year, which will begin at 4:30 pm ET on CBS.
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As far as lions are concerned, they have been Playing on Thanksgiving since 1934But the tradition of the Lions-Cowboys doubleheader did not begin until 1966. After that, it took 40 years for the NFL to add a primetime game and another 19 years for the league to make any other changes, so as you can tell, the NFL doesn’t like to mess with its Thanksgiving traditions.
The NFL loves playing on Thanksgiving and that’s because everyone in the country is always watching.
Thanksgiving games typically become the highest-rated regular season games of the year. In fact, the most-watched regular season game in NFL history came on Thanksgiving in 2022, when 42.1 million people watched the Cowboys defeat the Giants 28–20. There’s a very real possibility that record could fall on Thursday when the Cowboys host Patrick Mahomes and the Chiefs.
The most-watched opening game came last year when 37.5 million people watched the Lions defeat the Bears 23–20 in a game on CBS. With the Lions starting 30 minutes later this year, that record may also end Thursday.
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