The National Football League is the most successful sports operation in the world, and for my money it features the best talent in the best endeavor. It is almost always pitch-perfect in its organization: the length of the games, the length of the season, the number of teams, and the salary cap. What I cannot understand is how it gets wrong its Thanksgiving extravaganza.
I marvel at the big deal Americans make of Thanksgiving. There is no holiday like it in Canada, and there is certainly no other holiday I can imagine with such a solid sporting connection. As big as Thanksgiving might be, it would be diminished if it did not feature NFL football. There are now three games on this most special Thursday each year.
Unfortunately, these are now often meaningless contests, as parity makes it difficult to predict year to year who the competitive teams might be by this point in the season. As I type this, the third lopsided game of the day is churning towards its conclusion. Anyone who follows the NFL could have seen this disaster coming, but perhaps no one could have seen it coming last spring: far enough in advance to influence the schedule. However, it would not take an avid fan to know well in advance that the game involving the Detroit Lions would be a bigger turkey than that sitting on tables across the United States. The Lions are chronic underachievers, and they have been utterly terrible for about a decade. This year, they lost by more than five touchdowns. Their involvement in Thanksgiving football each year is based only on tradition, and I think it is one tradition the National Football League could do without.
