Category: Following Sports

Thanksgiving is the ultimate American holiday. Its focusses are family, food, and football. To celebrate the first two, it helps to know about the third. To that end, we’re offering a free copy of our Guide to Football for the Curious in addition to publishing previews about each of the three Thanksgiving NFL football games.

The first of the three Thanksgiving NFL football games this year is between the Chicago Bears and the Detroit Lions at 12:30 p.m. on CBS. Despite it being at the start of the day, this game’s Thanksgiving food analog is the classic Thanksgiving pies: pecan and pumpkin. It’s definitely traditional, like pies, the Detroit Lions, are an ever-present part of the day. And, like the pies, if it weren’t Thanksgiving, you might not find this game as tasty. While the other two games on Thanksgiving feature teams battling it out for first place in their divisions and a playoff spot, this game has one team still alive for the playoffs but the other lost its relevance several weeks ago. 

Plot

For years and years, the Detroit Lions Thanksgiving game was a bit of a joke. Every year, the Lions would host a game and every year it seemed they would lose. Truthfully, they’ve been a bad team for a long time:

• They’ve won one Thanksgiving game since 2003.
• They’ve made the playoffs only once since 2000 and haven’t won a playoff game since 1991.
• They’ve only had two winning seasons since 2000 and during that time became the only team in history to go winless for an entire 16 game season.

This year, everything is upside-down. The Detroit Lions are having their best season in a long time this year. They are 7-4 (seven wins, four losses) on the season but for the first time all year, find themselves in second place in their division, behind the Green Bay Packers. The Lions have lost two games in a row, so they are reeling a little bit, but they also must be liking their chops in anticipation of facing the Chicago Bears in this game. For years, the Bears have been the big brother that beat up on the Lions but this year the only big they are is a big mess. The Bears may have hit their low-point three weeks ago when they lost 55-14 to the Green Bay Packers on national television and dropped to 3-6. I was, frankly, surprised that their head coach was not fired following that game. Since then, they’ve won two games against sub-par opponents but these wins have not inspired much confidence at all.

Characters

Jay Cutler, Quarterback on the Chicago Bears

The quarterback of an NFL team is supposed to be its leader and moral center. Jay Cutler subverts that expectation publicly by appearing noticeably disinterested and disengaged from the game. He is so expressive in this way that he’s inspired a popular Tumblr blog called “Smokin’ Jay Cutler” that features photos of him with photoshopped cigarettes dangling from his mouth in honor of “the most apathetic looking athlete in the history of sports”. Cutler is a strong-armed quarterback (he once controversially claimed to have a stronger arm than legendary Denver quarterback John Elway) who is prone to making bad decisions with where he chooses to throw the ball.

Brandon Marshall, Wide Receiver on the Chicago Bears

Brandon Marshall is one of my favorite NFL players. He’s an outspoken advocate for mental health and lives his beliefs on the subject by speaking openly about his own struggles with borderline personality disorder. He’s every bit as passionate on the outside as Cutler is apathetic. Marshall plays his heart out on the field and sometimes blows his vocal chords out screaming on the sidelines.

Matt Forte and Alshon Jeffrey, Running Back and Wide Receiver on the Chicago Bears

Matt Forte and Alshon Jeffrey are important figures on the field and quiet ones off the field. Forte, from Louisiana, and Jeffrey, from South Carolina, are both understated stars. They let their play on the field speak for them. Forte is an excellent running back who does a lot of his damage on screen or swing passes. Jeffrey is a tall, powerful receiver, who often overpowers the defenders assigned to guard him. They both represent a type of quiet athletic elegance.

Martellus Bennett, Tight End on the Chicago Bears

Martellus Bennett is a receiving tight end with almost limitless talent. As a member of the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants, he showed tantalizing moments of superb play mixed in with a bunch of mediocrity. This year on the Bears, he seemed like he had finally put it together to play consistently at a high level, but has slid backwards over the past month. His persona slants more towards brash than anything else. His nickname, which he gave himself, is “The Black Unicorn” based on an answer he gave to a reporter who asked him about his conditioning in 2012: “I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, I’m faster than I’ve ever been. I could run all day. I’m kind of like a black unicorn out there”

Calvin Johnson, Wide Receiver on the Detroit Lions

Calvin Johnson’s nickname is Megatron and, over his years playing football, he’s either evolved to fit the name or the name was a perfect fit for him to begin with. He is how you imagine a football playing robot would be designed. He’s tall — 6’5″. He can leap — 43 inch standing vertical jump. He is fast, very fast — 4.35 second 40 yard dash. Yet none of these raw measurements can express his excellence at making amazing catches when his team needs him to do so. He is a fantastic player.

Matthew Stafford, Quarterback on the Detroit Lions

Matthew Stafford is one of those classic enigmas of football. Because football is such an intertwined sport, it’s often hard to isolate the performance of one player from another. This is Stafford’s sixth year in the NFL but each one of them has been with star receiver, Calvin Johsnon. Even after six years, it’s hard to tell if Stafford’s good performances are due to Johnson’s brilliance or whether he would be successful on his own. Stafford plays football like a swashbuckler. He takes risks, throws from all sorts of strange angles, and plays through a lot of big hits.

DeAndre Levy, Linebacker on the Detroit Lions

Finally, we give the defenders some attention. DeAndre Levy is the leader of Detroit’s defense and potentially a prototype for a new breed of NFL linebackers. As the game has slanted more towards passing, a linebacker’s ability to cover tight ends and even wide receivers has become more important. Levy is one of the smallest linebackers in the league, which helps him in pass coverage, and one of the most explosive, which helps him defend the run. According to Robert Klemko in a fun profile of Levy in The MMQB, “Levy is an oddball with a prospector’s beard, a quiet nature and an uncommon zeal for travel.” Sounds like a fun guy to me.

Ndamukong Suh, Defensive Tackle on the Detroit Lions

Ndamukong Suh made his name as one of the NFL’s biggest bad actors, back when being violent ON the field was enough to qualify you for NFL bad boy. Now that we live in the era or Ray Rice and Adrian Peterson, Suh’s offenses seem quaint in comparison. Elizabeth Merrill wrote of Suh in her profile of him for ESPN, “He likes to surprise people, finding immense enjoyment in debunking the notion that he’s a thickheaded hit man… he didn’t get his degree in basket weaving or, say, communications. He matriculated through a rigorous engineering program.” Suh is an enigma, a truly destructive force on the football field who seems to be a righteous dude off the field.

Brothers Fuller? Kyle Fuller, defensive back on the Chicago Bears and Corey Fuller, wide receiver on the Detroit Lions

This game could feature the rare sight of a pair of brothers literally playing against each other on Thanksgiving. If they were both healthy and playing, Kyle might easily be covering Corey, trying to keep him from catching a pass. Alas, Kyle hurt his knee this past weekend and may miss the game and Corey is relatively far back on the Lions’ depth chart.

Marc Trestman, Head Coach of the Chicago Bears

Trestman took an interesting path to become a head coach in the NFL. He made a name for himself as head coach of the Canadian Football League Montreal Alouettes, where he won two championships and became known as an offensive mastermind. That reputation has been sorely tested this year in Chicago where his highly talented offense has sputtered and stalled more than it has excelled. He’s definitely on the hot-seat and could be fired at the end of the year.

Jim Caldwell, Head Coach of the Detroit Lions

Way back in 2010, columnist Bill Simmons and his readers had tagged Caldwell as an almost absurdly unemotional coach. As coach of the Indiannapolis Colts, Caldwell was seen as almost a care-taker thanks to quarterback Peyton Manning’s hands-on domineering nature. As much maligned as he is, Caldwell has the Lions playing as well as they have for more than a decade, so he must be doing something right.