When the Detroit Lions host the Chicago Bears to open up this year’s slate of Thanksgiving games, two men will loom large over proceedings.
The one whose legacy is the reason why we are fated to always watch the Lions on the final Thursday in November, and the one whose legacy is still being built, but who we have to thank for getting us excited about tuning in this year, having made the 2024 Detroit Lions the best team in the NFL right now.
Needless to say, that has not always been the case, and it has often meant a Thanksgiving Day ordeal more arduous than tackling that third helping of turkey. As to why viewers have had to endure them every year, through good and bad? Well for that, there is one man to thank: George A Richards.
Before the NFL was even dreamed up, the Yale v Princeton game, first played on November 30, 1876 and running for six years, spawned the Intercollegiate Football Association’s championship game of 1882.
In the late 1890s professional games started to be played on Thanksgiving, but the league, such as it was, was a far cry from the logistical and financial behemoth it now is.
In 1934 Mr Richards, owner of the Lions, was looking for a marketing device to get the city excited about its fledgling football franchise, so decided that playing a game on the holiday would help raise his side’s profile. Fans were already used to watching college or high-school games on that day, so why not a professional game?
It was a gamble, in a city where the sporting scene was dominated by the baseball team, the Tigers – who at the time were the reigning American League champions and would go on to win the World Series the next summer.
Fortunately the move paid off: not only did that game on November 29, 1934, sell out their 26,000-seat stadium, they had to turn people away at the gates. But what made Richards’ gamble capture the imagination more widely was that he found a way to reach an even wider audience.
His WJR radio station was among the biggest in the country and he used his not inconsiderable influence in the industry to convince NBC to broadcast a Thanksgiving game on 94 stations nationwide.
‘This may be the one great contribution to football that the Detroit Lions have made, other than Barry Sanders and Billy Sims,’ was how the CFL coach and pundit Jeff Reinebold once put it.
It is fair to say there have been plenty of occasions when Lions fans may have wished it wasn’t so, when they could crack on with being mediocre aware from the glare of the brightest of the regular season’s spotlights.
They have won only 37 out of their 84 games played, and they host their division rivals the Bears this year having not won on Thanksgiving since 2016. Indeed in 2019 and 2021 they were beaten by the Bears.
But this year promises to be different thanks to the man who has quietly gone about reviving (if indeed that is the word to describe a team who has never actually been to a Super Bowl) the Lions.
In Dan Campbell’s first season, in 2021 – which coincided with former No1 pick Jared Goff joining the franchise as quarterback – was a horrible 3-13-1 affair. But a year later, after they took the defensive end Aidan Hutchinson with the second overall pick and Amon-Ra St Brown in the fourth round, they improved to 9-8.
A year ago, having added Jahmyr Gibbs and Sam LaPorta to the offense, they not only won a play-off game for the first time since the 1991 season, they went all the way to the NFC Championship game, but lost to San Francisco.
It is a remarkable achievement, not least with a signal-caller who many thought was a busted flush in LA after failing to repeat the Super Bowl run in his third year with the Rams. It is fair to say that the head coach deserves all the plaudits directed his way, not least as he has to belie his gruff manner that had him written off as a man who had the communication skills, if nothing else, to succeed.
But behind the rarely contained anger and enthusiasm there is undoubtedly an astute coaching mind at work.
However, much of his success has come from being a man who the players want to play for, who in many ways has broken the mold of what it takes to be an NFL coach.
As offensive tackle Dan Skipper said last season: ‘It’s very refreshing to play for someone who doesn’t seem to care about the corporate culture. He’s unapologetically him. You can love him or you can hate him, but he is who he is.
‘You never need to question where you stand. You never need to tiptoe. He tells it like it is. He’s got so much passion for football, for life, for everything.’
Like he was as a player and is as a coach, so are his teams. Tough and unyielding but with hidden depths. Yes the offense relies a lot on the one-two running back punch of Sonic (aka Gibbs, the speedy one) and Knuckles (aka David Montgomery, the strong one), but the Lions are not afraid to utilize the two men’s strengths out of the passing game, not just a traditional running game.
In St Brown, they have one of the best receivers in the league, with perhaps the biggest chip on his shoulder, happy to reel off the list of 16 wide receivers taken before him in the Draft. This year he has the eight most yards among receivers (747), while his nine touchdowns is second only to Ja’Marr Chase.
Such weapons, marshaled by quarterback Goff, have added up to the highest-scoring offense in the league that has propelled the team to the uncharted water of a 10-1 record.
But as the comprehensive wins in the past two weeks have shown, this is not just a team who will outscore you in a basketball game, they will drain the fight from you on the other side of the ball.
They lost Hutchinson to a potentially season-ending leg injury in the middle of October. Their response? A defense that has conceded the fewest touchdowns and fewest points in the league. Defensive coordinator Aaron Glenn is making the league take note.
Pick your stat: the Lions have not surrendered a second-half point in three straight games, their longest such streak since the first four games of the 1980 season; they have not surrendered a touchdown in ten consecutive quarters for the first time since November 20-December 5, 1983; they have only allowed seven passing touchdowns through the first 11 games of the season, their fewest since 1986, when they only allowed six.
Campbell would no doubt like to break his Thanksgiving duck (he lost all three he played in, twice with Dallas and once with Detroit). The holiday is about the three Fs: food, family and football. For the Lions this year, little else matters but the W, and the Bears should provide ample fodder.
But they will already be looking further ahead. For Detroit this is a generational team that has any number of ways of beating you, and it would be a brave man to bet against them breaking that Super Bowl appearance duck.
