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The National Football League (NFL) on Thanksgiving Day is a traditional series of games played during the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States. It has been a regular occurrence since the league's inception in 1920. Currently, three NFL games are played every Thanksgiving. The first two are hosted by the Detroit Lions and the Dallas Cowboys; a third game, with no fixed opponents, has been played annually since 2006. ==History== The concept of American football games being played on Thanksgiving Day dates back to 1876, shortly after the game had been invented, as it was a day that most people had off work. In that year, the college football teams at Yale and Princeton began an annual tradition of playing each other on Thanksgiving Day.〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher=College Football Data Warehouse )〕 The University of Michigan also made it a tradition to play annual Thanksgiving games, holding 19 such games from 1885 to 1905.〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher=University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher=University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher=University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher=University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library )〕〔(【引用サイトリンク】publisher=University of Michigan, Bentley Historical Library )〕 The Thanksgiving Day games between Michigan and the Chicago Maroons in the 1890s have been cited as "The Beginning of Thanksgiving Day Football." In some areas, high-school teams play on Thanksgiving, usually to wrap-up the regular-season. By the time football had become a professional event, playing on Thanksgiving had already become an institution. Records of pro football being played on Thanksgiving date back to as early as the 1890s, with the first pro–am team, the Allegheny Athletic Association of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In 1902, the "National" Football League, a Major League Baseball-backed organization based entirely in Pennsylvania and unrelated to the current NFL, attempted to settle its championship over Thanksgiving weekend; after the game ended in a tie, eventually all three teams in the league claimed to have won the title. Members of the Ohio League, during its early years, usually placed their marquee matchups on Thanksgiving Day. For instance, in 1905 and 1906 the Latrobe Athletic Association and Canton Bulldogs, considered at the time to be two of the best teams in professional football (along with the Massillon Tigers), played on Thanksgiving. A rigging scandal with the Tigers leading up to the 1906 game led to severe drops in attendance for the Bulldogs and ultimately led to their suspension of operations. During the 1910s, the Ohio League stopped holding Thanksgiving games because many of its players coached high school teams and were unavailable. This was not the case in other regional circuits: in 1919, the New York Pro Football League featured a Thanksgiving matchup between the Buffalo Prospects and the Rochester Jeffersons. The game ended in a scoreless tie, leading to a rematch the next Sunday for the league championship. The first owner of the Lions, G.A. Richards, started the tradition of the Thanksgiving Day game as a gimmick to get people to go to Lions football games, and to continue a tradition begun by the city's previous NFL teams.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=The Origins of the Thanksgiving Day Tradition )〕 Several other NFL teams played regularly on Thanksgiving in first eighteen years of the league, including the Chicago Bears and Chicago Cardinals (1922–33; the Bears played the Lions from 1934 to 1938 while the Cardinals switched to the Green Bay Packers for 1934 and 1935), Frankford Yellow Jackets, Pottsville Maroons, Buffalo All-Americans, Canton Bulldogs (even after the team moved to Cleveland they played the 1924 Thanksgiving game in Canton), and the New York Giants (1929–38, who always played a crosstown rival). During the Franksgiving controversy in 1939 and 1940, the only two teams to play the game were the Pittsburgh Steelers and Philadelphia Eagles, as both teams were in the same state (Pennsylvania). (At the time, then-president Franklin Roosevelt wanted to move the holiday for economic reasons and many states were resistant to the move; half the states recognized the move and the other half did not. This complicated scheduling for Thanksgiving games. Incidentally, the two teams were also exploring the possibility of a merger at the time.〔See also: Pennsylvania Keystoners〕) Because of the looming World War II and the resulting shorter seasons, the NFL did not schedule any Thanksgiving games in 1941, nor did it schedule any in the subsequent years until the war ended in 1945. When the Thanksgiving games resumed in 1945, only one game would be played each year (except 1950 and 1952), and only the Lions would have a permanent Thanksgiving game. In 1951, the Packers began a thirteen-season run as the perpetual opponent to the Lions each year through 1963. In 1966, the Dallas Cowboys, who had been founded six years earlier, adopted the practice of hosting Thanksgiving games. It is widely rumored that the Cowboys sought a guarantee that they would regularly host Thanksgiving games as a condition of their very first one (since games on days other than Sunday were uncommon at the time and thus high attendance was not a certainty). Incidentally, Texas was the last state to recognize the "fourth Thursday" rule for Thanksgiving that had been imposed as a result of the Franksgiving compromise two decades prior, and had just adopted the rule (as opposed to the previous last-Thursday rule) in 1961, five years before Dallas started hosting Thanksgiving games. (The fourth and final Thursdays were the same between 1957 and 1960; the last time Texas had celebrated Thanksgiving on the week after the rest of the country was 1956.) In 1975 and 1977, the St. Louis Cardinals replaced Dallas as a host team (Dallas then hosted St. Louis in 1976). Although the Cardinals, at the time known as the "Cardiac Cards" due to their propensity for winning very close games, were a modest success at the time, they were nowhere near as popular nationwide as the Cowboys, who were regular Super Bowl contenders during this era. This, combined with St. Louis's consistently weak attendance and opposition from the Kirkwood–Webster Groves Turkey Day Game (a local high school football contest) led to Dallas resuming regular hosting duties in 1978. The All-America Football Conference and American Football League, both of which would later be absorbed into the NFL, also held Thanksgiving contests, although neither of those leagues had permanent hosts. Likewise, the AFL of 1926 also played two Thanksgiving games in its lone season of existence, while the AFL of 1936 hosted one in its first season, which featured the Cleveland Rams, a future NFL team, and the 1940–41 incarnation of the American Football League played two games in 1940 on the earlier "Franksgiving" date. Notwithstanding the aforementioned St. Louis-hosted games in 1975 and 1977, the two "traditional" Thanksgiving Day pro football games since the 1970 AFL-NFL merger have then been in Detroit and Dallas. Because of TV network commitments, to make sure that both the AFC-carrying network (NBC from the 1970 merger to 1997, and CBS since 1998) and the NFC-carrying network (CBS from the 1970 merger to 1993, and Fox since 1994) got at least one game each, one of these games was between NFC opponents, and one featured AFC-NFC opponents. Thus, the AFC could showcase only one team on Thanksgiving, and the AFC team was always the visiting team. Since 2006, a third NFL game on Thanksgiving has been played at night. It originally aired on the NFL Network as part of its ''Thursday Night Football'' package until 2011; NBC began carrying the night game in 2012. The Thanksgiving night game has no fixed opponents or conferences, enabling the league to freely choose whatever marquee match-up to feature on that night. The 2012 changes also allowed both Dallas and Detroit in the future to offer NFC games (one would be played at night), and CBS can offer a game with two AFC teams. In 2014, the NFL added the ''cross-flex'' rule, allowing CBS to televise NFC away games, and Fox to broadcast AFC away games, under select circumstances on Sunday afternoons;〔(【引用サイトリンク】 title=NFL announces Week 13 flex plan )〕 however, this did not cover the Thanksgiving contests. CBS also signed a separate contract to carry ''Thursday Night Football'' for the 2014 and 2015 seasons, which allowed that network to carry games from either conference on Thursdays;〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.cbssports.com/nfl/eye-on-football/24431657/cbs-to-take-eight-thursday-night-games-in-2014 )〕 those years, the Thanksgiving contests all featured NFC teams, with no AFC teams playing on the holiday either year. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「NFL on Thanksgiving Day」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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