By Leah Asmelash | CNN
Thanksgiving, for many in the US, usually means a few things: food, family… and football.
Every year, millions tune in to watch the annual Thanksgiving NFL games — 2022’s matchup between the Dallas Cowboys and the New York Giants garnered an audience of 42.1 million people, becoming the most-watched NFL regular season game in history. (By comparison, 33.8 million tuned in to President Joe Biden’s inauguration).
But how did America’s favorite sport become so linked to the holiday? CNN spoke with experts to find out.
The tradition actually started with college football
Football started out as an amateur sport — played mainly in elite northeastern colleges like Harvard, Princeton, Yale and Columbia, said Matthew Andrews, a history professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The Thanksgiving tradition began back in 1876, when the Intercollegiate Football Association began hosting their championship game on the holiday. But the tradition didn’t begin to pick up steam until 1880, Andrews said, when the association moved the end-of-season game to New York.
It’s this game, Andrews said, that took football from a sporting event to a social one.
“This game was sort of the unofficial start of the winter holiday social season,” he said. “People from the different colleges and universities would flood New York City, and there would be pregame Wednesday night dinners and Friday and Saturday night there would be post-game balls and trips to the theater. And that’s when it really takes off, in the 1880s and the 1890s.”
And so, by the mid-1890s, college football and Thanksgiving day were synonymous.
Not everyone approved of the new tradition
Thanksgiving didn’t really become an annually celebrated holiday until 1863, when Abraham Lincoln encouraged its recognition as a way to promote unionism during the Civil War, Andrews said. The rise of Thanksgiving, then, is almost congruent with the rise of…
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