The NFL's Thanksgiving Obsession Has Gone Too Far. Here's Why Five Games That Week Is Corporate Greed Disguised As Tradition.

The NFL has officially lost its mind. The league announced it is expanding its Thanksgiving slate to five games in 2026, turning what used to be a special holiday tradition into a full week of football that makes about as much sense as asking your family to skip dinner to watch three consecutive games. This is not innovation. This is not tradition. This is a league so desperate to squeeze every last dollar out of its broadcast partners and gambling sites that it has completely forgotten what made Thanksgiving football special in the first place. The NFL has turned a cultural institution into a content machine, and frankly, it should be embarrassed about it.

Let me be crystal clear about something. The original Thanksgiving games, the ones with history and meaning, those were great. The Detroit Lions on Thanksgiving afternoon. The Dallas Cowboys following that. Those were anchors of the holiday. Families gathered around the television. It was part of the fabric of American Thanksgiving. But now the NFL wants five games. Five. That means people are expected to choose between family, food, and football for an entire week. That is not progress. That is greed with a football helmet on top of it.

The league's logic is transparent and it is shameful. More games means more inventory to sell to broadcasters. More games means more gambling opportunities for DraftKings and FanDuel and every other sportsbook that has basically become a financial partner with the NFL at this point. More games means more eyeballs, more ad revenue, more everything except what actually matters. The NFL stopped asking itself if it should do something and started asking if it could monetize it. Those are two very different questions, and the league is failing at the first one while succeeding way too well at the second.

Here is what really bothers me about this expansion. The Thanksgiving games used to feel exclusive. You had to plan your day around them. You carved out time. Your family understood that football was happening and you made peace with it. There was a mutual respect there. Now the NFL is saying we want five games spread across the week, which means there is no escape. You cannot have a Thanksgiving where football is not a constant presence. You cannot have a traditional holiday where the meal is the focus and football is the complement. Instead, you get football as the main course and Thanksgiving dinner as the side dish. This is backwards.

The NFL will tell you that fans want more football. The NFL will point to ratings and engagement metrics and argue that expanding Thanksgiving is just giving people what they want. This is the lie that drives me crazy. Just because people will watch something does not mean it is good for the sport or good for society. People will watch a car crash too, but that does not make car crashes beneficial. The NFL has convinced itself that maximizing content is the same thing as maximizing value, and those two things are absolutely not the same. You can destroy the specialness of something by overexposing it. You can kill tradition by commercializing it to death. That is what five Thanksgiving games does.

Think about the scheduling nightmare this creates. Now the NFL has to figure out where to put these games. You have Thanksgiving Eve games, which means you are asking teams to prepare for football on a day when most Americans are traveling. You have games on Thanksgiving Day itself, which is already crowded. Then you have games in the days following, which means you have compressed scheduling that creates injury risk and fatigue. The league does not care about this because the league cares about dollars. It does not care that coaches are working their teams harder around a holiday that is supposed to be about rest and family. It does not care that players are grinding when they should be recovering. It cares about five games and five sets of broadcast fees.

Let me address the argument that this is good for the sport because it puts playoff-level games on national television during Thanksgiving week. This is where the NFL's marketing meets its delusion. Just because a game is played on Thanksgiving does not make it special. The specialness came from the tradition and the scarcity and the fact that everyone in the country knew that football was happening whether they liked it or not. Now you are trying to manufacture specialness by just throwing more football at people. That is not how tradition works. Tradition is built over decades. It is earned. It is not created by a conference room full of executives trying to hit their revenue targets.

The impact on the teams involved is something the league should be thinking about but clearly is not. If you are one of the Thanksgiving franchises, you are already dealing with an uneven schedule. You get forced into a national television slot during the busiest time of the year. Your players cannot have a normal holiday. Your coaching staff is preparing for football when they should be with their families. The NFL used to compensate teams for these disadvantages with bye weeks and scheduling considerations. Now the league just shrugs and says this is the new normal. The teams have to deal with it because the league is too focused on monetization to care about fairness.

What really gets under my skin is that the NFL is using the language of tradition to justify the expansion of corporate greed. The league will tell you that it is honoring Thanksgiving by putting more games on television. This is insulting to anyone who understands what tradition actually means. Tradition is about doing something the same way year after year because it matters. Tradition is about restraint and respect for what came before. This is not tradition. This is a perversion of tradition. This is taking something sacred and using it as a vehicle for maximizing profit. The NFL should be honest about what it is doing instead of dressing it up in the language of Thanksgiving values.

I also have a problem with the gambling angle here, and I am going to say it plainly. The NFL's expansion of Thanksgiving games is directly tied to the explosion of legal sports gambling in this country. The more games the league puts on television, the more opportunities for people to make bets. The more games happen during prime family time, the more normalized gambling becomes in American households. A kid is sitting with his grandfather on Thanksgiving, and instead of talking about football or family, everyone is tracking their bets and talking about point spreads. That is not progress. That is the NFL allowing the gambling industry to colonize one of the last family traditions we have left. The league made a deal with the devil when it embraced sports betting as a revenue stream, and now it is using gambling motivation to expand what used to be a sacred day.

The counter argument is that I am being nostalgic and that I need to accept that sports are evolving. Maybe that is true. Maybe I am being backwards about this. But here is what I know. The things that made the NFL great were not always the things that made the most money. Sometimes the best decisions were the ones that prioritized the sport and the fans and the tradition over the quarterly earnings report. The original decision to have Thanksgiving games was not made by a revenue committee. It was made because it was a good idea. It made sense culturally. It created something special. The decision to expand to five games is being made by people who have looked at the numbers and decided that more is always better. It is a fundamentally different way of thinking about the sport, and it is wrong.

Here is my verdict. The NFL has made a mistake with the Thanksgiving expansion. The league is prioritizing short term revenue over long term tradition. The league is damaging the specialness of one of its best national television products by overexposing it. The league is creating scheduling inequities that will disadvantage certain teams. The league is allowing gambling interests to colonize family time. And the league is doing all of this while using the language of tradition as cover. This is not good for football. This is not good for families. This is not good for Thanksgiving. This is good for the NFL's bottom line, and that is all that matters to the people making these decisions. That should make you angry, because it should make everyone angry.