A baseball conflict prevented the Ravens from getting the Super Bowl champions’ traditional Thursday night Week One home game. But they will get a Thursday night home game on NBC.
The NFL’s 2013 regular season schedule includes the Ravens hosting the Steelers on Thanksgiving night. Baltimore and Pittsburgh have one of the NFL’s best rivalries, so it’s easy to see why the league wanted to put that game in one of the NFL’s marquee time slots.
A harder decision to understand is what the NFL is doing with the mid-afternoon game on CBS: The Raiders will visit Dallas. Almost everyone expected the Cowboys to host the Broncos on Thanksgiving, and it would seem that Peyton Manning and Co. would make for a much more attractive Thanksgiving opponent for Dallas. But the NFL has decided to put the Silver and Black on Thanksgiving instead.
And Thanksgiving will open on FOX with the most common Thanksgiving rivalry in NFL history, Packers at Lions. This will be the 21st time that the Lions and Packers have met on Thanksgiving.