The Two Turkeys of Thanksgiving

Every year at Thanksgiving we get a turkey. And we love it. It's great alongside the stuffing. It's wonderful covered in gravy. It's fantastic in combination with some cranberry sauce. It might even be best of all as leftovers on a roll as a mini-sandwich. We love turkey on Thanksgiving!

Mmmm…turkey!!!

Every year at Thanksgiving we get a turkey. And we hate it. It's the same thing every year. You'll think maybe this year will be different, but no, this turkey is still terrible. It doesn't matter how you dress it up or what you put around it, this turkey is just lousy.

This second turkey: the Detroit Lions.

We look forward to watching football every Thanksgiving. And yet when we attempt to watch the football, we end up with the Detroit Lions.

The Detroit Lions are the turkeys of the NFL, and by that I don't mean they are a delicious bird. Dictionary.com lists the fourth definition of the word turkey as, "a person or thing of little appeal; dud; loser." That certainly describes the Detroit Lions.

Before somehow winning the past two years, the Detroit Lions had lost 11 out of 12 Thanksgiving Day games, including nine straight. And most of those games weren't even close, with the Lions losing by scores like 41-9, 27-7, 47-10, 34-12, and 45-24. In fact, of those nine straight losses, only one game had a final margin of less than 11 points!

I'm sure when they named the team the Detroit Lions, they were thinking of a fierce jungle animal, like this:

Actual lion

But in reality they play more like this:

You know, it's kind of unfair for me to compare the Detroit Lions with cartoon lions.
(I hope the cartoon lions accept my apology.)

I find it kind of amazing that every year thousand of people in Detroit spend their Thanksgiving going to the stadium to watch the Lions lose. What a horrible way to spend your holiday.

Over the past twenty years, there are only two things I remember from Detroit's Thanksgiving games, and both of them involve ineptitude.

One was from the 2012 game, when the Lion's head coach, Jim Schwartz, didn't know how or when to properly challenge a referee's call and cost his team a touchdown in a game they ended up losing in overtime. Typical Detroit Lion incompetence.

The other memorable "play" happened in 1998 during the coin toss in overtime when Steelers running back Jerome Bettis called "tails," but the referee thought he called "heads," awarding the ball to the Lions and enabling them a rare Thanksgiving win. This one wasn't Lion incompetence, but it was incompetence nonetheless.

Happily, though, the Detroit Lions aren't the only turkey we get on Thanksgiving. A well-cooked, juicy turkey will help make the day a good one. And if we eat enough of it, it just might help us in getting a nap so we can sleep through the other Thanksgiving turkey: the Detroit Lions football game.