If Week 12 of the NFL season taught us anything, it’s to never doubt the NFL, but this is a brutal Thanksgiving slate of games.
Last Sunday blessed us with exhilarating endings in games that were supposed to be blowouts. The Dallas Cowboys special teams came up huge against the Washington Commanders. The Kansas City Chiefs barely beat the lowly Carolina Panthers. The Tennessee Titans beat the Houston Texans in their own building.
We can never judge matchups on paper. It’s the reason the games are played between the four lines. But this Thanksgiving Day lineup of games is pretty atrocious. It’s hard to ignore.
Imagine your family just finished indulging in a turkey dinner surrounded by so many side dishes that there’s hardly any room on the table. You flop into the living room and see Cooper Rush starting for the 4-7 Cowboys against the 2-9 New York Giants. Give me a break.
The slate starts with Chicago Bears rookie sensation Caleb Williams against the Detroit Lions, who are one of the NFL’s best teams. Sounds like a good game, but the Lions are -9.5 favorites. The Bears are, week in and week out, one of the most inept offensive football teams in America. This one could get ugly quick.
The Giants are so bad that they haven’t even named a starter for this game yet. A right forearm injury has Tommy DeVito unlikely to play on Thanksgiving, which is a major disappointment to Italian families everywhere. Instead, we get to see Drew Lock battle Rush and the Cowboys.
(Screw you, Daniel Jones, who could’ve somehow signed with Dallas and played his former team on Thanksgiving.)
The nightcap should at least be watchable. Maybe? You probably at least have a few fantasy football players suiting up in this game as the Miami Dolphins will travel to Lambeau Field to play the Green Bay Packers.
The Packers are just -3.5 favorites in this game, but it feels difficult to envision a path where the Dolphins travel all the way up to Wisconsin and pull off an upset. The 8-3 Packers are sitting pretty after dismantling the San Francisco 49ers 38-10 on Sunday.
It’s probably time to stop treating Thanksgiving like some great sports holiday. On the Fourth of July, we at least get some highly anticipated divisional MLB games. On Christmas Day, the NBA always comes through with intriguing matchups, and now the NFL has their own lineup of games, too. This Christmas, the NFL games are on Netflix, so let’s hope they figure out some issues from the Jake Paul vs. Mike Tyson fight.
It sounds like this Thanksgiving, we’ll all be forced to hear our family members recap the results of the election while we watch bad football.
