Random thoughts after a day of watching football:
I don't watch the parades much. They're for a different target demo: kids who watch for the balloons, and "theater kids" for whom this rivals the Tonys for being the biggest Broadway showcase of the year. I do theater but I'm not a "theater kid." (Most of whom are not, in fact, kids anymore.)
Anyway... for the past several years, I've spent my mornings turning on the live football at 10:00. At that time of day, the games are usually at the high school level—it's a dying tradition. Here in New York State, the last games in Buffalo stopped being played in 2009, and in Westchester County north of New York City, the numerous games that used to be played there slowly stopped, one by one, until the last one ended in 2016. Nowadays, the tradition plays out mostly in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Jersey and parts of eastern Pennsylvania—on top of a few games in scattered cities like San Francisco, St. Louis, Baltimore, and Manchester, New Hampshire.
The cool part is that thanks to widespread broadband and video streaming that's easier than ever, so many of those games are now watchable. I sampled a few.
I compile a list on my own Web site, a tradition now in its 21st year. There's a certain charm to watching kids who aren't finely tuned professional football playing machines play the fundamentals in front of passionate hometown crowds. This year, there was rain on the East Coast so the action wasn't all that great, but it seemed like while I was "channel surfing" YouTube and the public-access channels, there was a stretch that seemed like every time I'd tune in, someone would break free for a touchdown. I can't say any of the dozens of games caught my particular attention, though some of the rivalries, including the crosstown rivalry in Plymouth, MA, or the century-old rivalry in turkey-producing hotbed Westerly, RI, have some compelling Thanksgiving ties.
But it was football, and it's an American tradition that I'm sad to see starting to fade as the major sports networks prefer to flood their schedules with basketball tournaments, as if they're (to borrow from
Mean Girls) trying to make 'fetch' happen by spending 20 years filling their schedules with basketball games.
Anyway, come noon, most of the early games wrap up, Alice's Restaurant gets played on the local classic rock station* (*I've heard that in some of the major markets, Alice's Restaurant has become such a phenomenon that the stations play multiple versions multiple times a day. A bit much, even if you'd ask Arlo Guthrie himself.) and the Fuller clan gathers up their dishes to pass for a dinner together. We get there, and as we finish preparing the meal, we have the dog show on one TV and the Bears-Lions on the other. (Some of the younger kids in the family love the dog show. In contrast to the basketball, that tradition actually did succeed in catching on and I have taken a liking to it myself.) The dog show finishes up and I flip to an HBCU rivalry, Tuskegee/Alabama State's Turkey Day Classic, which turns out to be pretty well lopsided in Alabama State's favor quickly. On my earbuds, it's the St. Louis game, which starts later than the Northeast games—a century-old rivalry known as the Turkey Day Game between Kirkwood and Webster Groves.
Bears-Lions... well... it was ugly. You never want to see a game end like that. First of all, Detroit seemed like they had lost the last umpteen straight games on this holiday, and if the 10-1 Lions couldn't make easy work of a 4-7 Chicago Bears team with a headcase like Caleb Williams as their starter... then maybe it's time to have someone else host that game. (The Bills had a stretch where they were regular opponents a few years ago and did quite well.) At first it looked like the Lions were going to run away with it in the first half... but slowly, but surely, that dread began to sink in. By late in the fourth quarter, it felt like Chicago had all the momentum. Kicking
wunderkind Jake Bates (who had several first-half hits) misses a field goal (albeit a non-crucial one), the Lions defense can't stop the Bears for beans, and all of a sudden, Williams has managed to take a start from his own 1-yard line into position where the Bears, with one remaining time out, could at least attempt a long-range field goal (and in a dome, with the way kickers have been playing this year, their odds are good). In a classic rookie mistake, Williams thinks he can get one more play in, call that time out and bring in the field goal team. Problem is... he takes too much time off the clock during that play, and it runs out before the ball is dead. Game over. Yet it feels... dirty. You could hear it in the crowd's response. This was not a game that felt like the end of a much-bemoaned streak. I was in western New York when they broke the drought. That wasn't the environment there. That was ... the Lions deserved to be embarrassed by an epic collapse,
how could the Bears be so stupid as to let them survive???In St. Louis, land of Ka-Kaw is the Law during the springtime, the high school rivalry game hit a weird snag. You see, Kirkwood—whose head coach is Jeremy Maclin, a Pro Bowl tight end in the NFL with a decade of playing experience, is really good. They're in the state playoff tournament in Missouri this year, and when that happens, the rules say that both the varsity teams sit and the JV teams play the Thanksgiving game. Webster Groves—is not good. They were 2-7 this year, and for the past decade, Kirkwood has blown Webster Groves out by humiliating margins. But because Kirkwood is in the playoffs, that means Webster Groves's seniors don't get to play their last varsity game. Now, a little context. Over two decades ago, I was part of a JV football team that went undefeated in our league, while our varsity team had a losing season (I can't remember the final record). One day late in the season, the coaches decided to let us scrimmage each other in practice—and we held our own. So I don't make this suggestion as flippantly as it may sound when I say that as mismatched as those two teams are at both the JV and varsity levels (Kirkwood was up 32-6 on WG in the JV game when I tuned out), they should have let the Webster Groves varsity team get their last game against the Kirkwood JVs. It would have likely been a more balanced contest. I get why they didn't, but they should have. Anyway... one of the things that struck me as so amusing was that the announcers of the game were flabbergasted when Maclin pulled a "swinging gate" play—the kind where you send your offensive line to the side of the field and make the snapper your eligible receiver. (The play didn't work.) They'd never seen such a play. I had to laugh.
We went back home after the Lions game. I only caught scattered parts of the rest of the dais. I'm not surprised the Cowboys were able to whoop the Giants; Cooper Rush is a solid backup and can string together wins. The Thanksgiving night college game is no longer the Egg Bowl or any other major college, but a match between American Athletic Conference teams Memphis and Tulane. It was closer than Giants/Cowboys and what seems like, as I write this, how Dolphins/Packers has turned out.
I didn't get to catch any of the halftime shows due to a combination of running errands and just plain tuning out. I heard secondhand Shaboozey (a ridiculous name, I know) had performed quite well, which is remarkable considering how bizarre most Thanksgiving halftime shows are. I did catch the saxophonist who played the national anthem in Detroit, and it sounded great, even if he may have held that last high not just a
smidge past the point of being a slight nuisance. We need more classy instrumental anthem performances like that.
God bless Thanksgiving football, and may it never fully fade away.
