Before John Madden and a certain gastronomic Matryoshka doll helped establish the NFL as the main course of America’s Thanksgiving celebrations, the holiday was dominated by simpler eats … and . As much as the Detroit Lions have clocked in for 85 of these feast-day games since suiting up for their very first in 1934, it wasn’t until the 1990s, a period that coincided with Madden’s first brush with the turducken, that pro football banished the college game to the Kids’ Table.
Arguably the most spectacular Thanksgiving football game in history was staged on Nov. 25, 1971, when the No. 2 Oklahoma Sooners hosted the No. 1 Nebraska Cornhuskers in a much-anticipated, endlessly hyped Big Eight matchup. Teed up that same week as the “Game of the Decade” in a Sports Illustrated cover story written by Dan Jenkins, the Turkey Day outing would be upgraded to “Game of the Century” status mere moments after Nebraska halfback Jeff Kinney powered his way into the end zone to secure a 35-31 lead with 1:38 on the clock.
Approximately 55 million viewers watched a tatterdemalion Kinney put the kibosh on the Sooners’ title hopes—a Thanksgiving TV turnout that the NFL has yet to duplicate. (The senior’s tearaway jersey, a novelty at the time, was in rags by the time he notched his fourth touchdown of the day.) Bear in mind that those 55 million impressions were totted up long before Nielsen began counting scores of drowsing aunts and hyperactive toddlers among its national TV deliveries.
To put ABC’s audience into perspective, the population of the United States in 1971 was around 207.7 million, which means that more than a quarter (27%) of all sentient Americans watched Nebraska’s big win. By way of comparison, 12% of the population watched the Game of This Century, as 35.6 million viewers tuned in to ESPN for Texas’ 41-38 victory over USC in the 2006 Rose Bowl.
For a more contemporaneous comparison, the NFL would set its own high-water mark just 52 days after Nebraska’s victory, as CBS’ coverage of Super Bowl VI would serve up 56.6 million viewers. Dallas breezed to a 24-3 win over Miami, and while the game wasn’t a nailbiter, the ratings mark would stick until CBS beat its own record four years later with the Steelers’ triumph over the Cowboys in Super Bowl X (57.7 million).
Oddly enough, ABC execs may have been a bit underwhelmed by the Huskers-Sooners ratings, as at least one staffer was telling anyone who would listen that the Thanksgiving Day game would reach as many as 80 million viewers. “We’ll eat the pros alive,” said ABC publicist Beano Cook—yes, that Beano Cook—in the run-up to the broadcast. “This will be one of the most-watched games of all time.”
And so it was … even if Cook’s prediction was the only aspect of the game that didn’t live up to the hype.
Of course, in those days it was a lot easier to achieve scale via TV, especially on a date when a captive audience is all but guaranteed. Discounting the weird UHF channels that sometimes came in if you stood on a chair while holding a wire hanger over your head, your Zenith picked up all of three broadcast signals. Cable wasn’t a thing, and access to the ARPANET was limited to a few research centers and military installations in the southwestern U.S. Hell, color TV was still such a novelty that leading manufacturers like RCA, Magnavox and GE that November ran print ads in the Sunday supplements to remind consumers that Nebraska-Oklahoma would be “televised in living color on Thanksgiving Day.”
Howard Cosell did his bit to help ABC draw a crowd, using his Monday Night Football platform as a megaphone through which to talk up the Big Eight battle. And once the word got out, it wasn’t all that hard for fans to find the game, as ABC in 1971 was college football’s lone rightsholder. NBC and CBS were where Americans linked up with the NFL on fall Sundays, while an unchallenged ABC made an event of its weekly college showcase.
A host of factors contributed to the end of college football’s stranglehold on Turkey Day, including the rise of cable TV (ESPN launched eight years after Nebraska’s memorable win) and the 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in NCAA vs. the Board of Regents of the University of Oklahoma. In a 7-2 decision, the court held that the stinginess with which the NCAA meted out televised football games was in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act; after the Football Television Committee’s draconian one-game-per-week mandate was found to be unlawful, the TV floodgates flew wide open as the conferences were empowered to cut their own distribution deals.
As college football coverage became supersaturated, the impact of the NFL’s annual Thanksgiving doubleheader began taking on critical mass. Much of the credit for the explosion of interest in the league’s showcase can be chalked up to Madden’s gleeful takeover of the holiday and the Cowboys’ dynastic ’90s run. Madden’s signature on-air move of tearing into a turducken with his bare hands became as central to the holiday as cranberry sauce and Dallas’ iconic five-pointed logo, and his decision to bestow a turkey drumstick upon Eagles linebacker Reggie White in lieu of an MVP trophy was a stroke of genius. (Madden was a multigenerational delight, as the dads in the family room fondly recalled his coaching days, the teens marveled at his poultry innovations and immoderate use of the telestrator, and their little brothers mainlined his eponymous video game series. Surely no single human being has been responsible for coining as many NFL fans as John Earl Madden.)
College still puts up big numbers on the Saturday following Thanksgiving Day, with Michigan-Ohio State drawing 19.1 million viewers two years ago, but the NFL’s grip on the holiday itself is not to be denied. Yes, the Tuskegee-Alabama State Turkey Day Classic is still going strong, although you’ll have to stream the game on SWAC TV, which leaves ESPN’s primetime Navy-Memphis game as Thursday’s lone televised college football outing.
There’s no sense in going head-to-head with a pair of afternoon NFL broadcasts that are all but guaranteed to scare up more than 40 million viewers, and as anyone who’s ever tried to sneak a new dish into the Thanksgiving dinner rotation can tell you, there’s little to be gained from an attempt at subverting tradition. (The Pilgrims may have gorged themselves on goose, but I don’t see any buckles on your hat.)
Toss in a pinch of rampageous conference realignments and many of the great November football clashes of yesteryear are now about as dead as the bird on the serving platter. While admittedly one-sided, the Kansas-Nebraska series endured for nearly 120 years before that annual meeting was derailed by a school shuffling in 2010. While a mere 89.3 miles of Highway 6 separate Baylor and Texas A&M, the Battle of the Brazos effectively conked out when the Aggies left the Big 12 in 2012, and the USC-Stanford rivalry that kicked off in 1905 was shelved after the wholesale atomization of the Pac-12.
For their part, Oklahoma and Nebraska won’t meet again until 2029. But for a two-year renewal meant to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Game of the Century, these two programs haven’t clashed horns since the No. 9 Sooners beat the No. 13 Huskers in the 2010 Big 12 Championship Game at Cowboys Stadium. ABC’s primetime broadcast averaged 8.98 million viewers, down 29% versus the previous year’s Texas-Nebraska game (12.7 million).