Are the Detroit Lions at Risk of Losing Their Thanksgiving Day Game?
It’s an annual tradition in my family to have the Detroit Lions game playing in the background during Thanksgiving get-togethers. But, is it possible that the Lions might lose that high-profile, annual game?
There’s always talk around the idea, but now that the Lions, once again, have no primetime games in the upcoming season, critics are starting to buzz about the Thanksgiving game again.
Mike North, the NFL V.P. of broadcast planning, discussed the Lions not having a primetime game during a media video call last week. Here’s what he said, via Pro Football Talk:
The real thing for us is, again, we look at them on national windows and we can never lose sight of the fact that Thanksgiving afternoon window — that 12:30 window in Detroit — most years is the Number Two or Number Three most-watched NFL game every year, so there’s no hesitation to put the Lions in a national window like that. . . . You could certainly make a pretty compelling argument they’re gonna get a lot more eyeballs for that one than they would have if they had one kind-of stand-alone Monday night game or one kind-of stand-alone Thursday night game. I acknowledge that it ‘looks odd’ to have them not in prime-time, but they’re gonna be playing in one of the five most-watched games of this season. That’s pretty good, too.
It’s kind of hard to gather much from his statement, but he sure seems to think the Lions are getting a sweet deal by being on the Thanksgiving game each year. As SideLineReport.com says, “The Lions being removed from Thanksgiving Day may not happen for awhile, if it happens at all. But the NFL is increasingly calculated with how games are scheduled, as new and old broadcast partners pony up bigger and bigger dollars for a piece of the pie.” I really hope the tradition stays, because even though we almost always lose, watching the Lions on Thanksgiving is one of my family’s big holiday traditions.