Despite the fact that the Lions, as expected, lost by 22 in Thursday’s early game and the Cowboys, as expected, won by 17, we don’t believe that these two traditional Thanksgiving hosts should lose their hammerlock on the fourth-Thursday-in-November games.
Indeed, as last night’s 26-6 log-sawer between the Giants and Broncos proved, there’s no guarantee that a rotation will result in more interesting action.
But there’s one major area in which the league can balance out the Thanksgiving (and, for that matter, the Thursday Night Football) experience.
With only three days to prepare for the Thanksgiving games, the road teams devote a chunk of those hours to travel. Though none of the three road teams played away from home on Sunday, which would have created two trips between the end of the Sunday game and the start of the Thursday contest, each of the home teams on Thanksgiving played a home game on the preceding Sunday.
So why not set up the schedule so that the teams hosting Thanksgiving games always play a road game on the prior Sunday? This would balance out the travel burden for both teams who play in a given Thanksgiving game.
We’d also extend this approach to every Thursday game, since it would impose on both teams who have to prepare quickly for another game a requirement to load up the players and the equipment and all the other stuff and move from one city to another.
But, like many of our ideas, this one probably makes too much sense to ever be taken seriously.