We are now 0 - 3 all time on Christmas and an eye gouging 6 - 19, at home over the past 25 years on Thanksgiving. For a mind boggling 0.214 winning percentage. How is this even possible? I know they usually line up some good opponents but that winning percentage is madness. Completely unacceptable. Embarrassing. It’s equivalent to winning less than 4 games a year (again, almost exclusively at home).
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Never liked playing on Thanksgiving! I wish they would do away with it.
Playing on Christmas unless it falls on a weekend is just idiotic and NFL greed!
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I never wanted to lose the TG day game. I think I’d be ok with it now.
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Screw that. It wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without Lions football.
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Just imagine them not ruining your holiday like they do 8 out of every 10 times they play.
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So is this the new excuse for this bad season, it’s un fair to make us play on Holidays.
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I’m not saying it’s unfair. I’m saying we suck when we play on the holidays.
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Letting a sports team ruin a family historical holiday may in fact say more about the individual than a sports team.
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To each their own.
Too much Tryptophan.
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After this year’s game I did an AI-assisted analysis of the last 25 Thanksgivings. Key takeaways:
–The league almost always schedules one of the toughest opponents for the Lions. The average opponent is a 10-win team. This is partially because the Lions have been bad for most of that time, and it’s hard to get people to watch an ugly game between two teams that have already been eliminated from the playoffs. BUT the Lions tend to get a tough opponent even when they’re good.
–This can most clearly be seen in the AFC games. The Lions play two AFC opponents at home every year. (Every other year will be three now that the schedule is expanded to 17 games, but I don’t have enough data on that yet). There’s only been one time when the Lions hosted an AFC opponent on Thanksgiving and the league scheduled the weaker of the two opponents. Incidentally this means we’re playing the Patriots next year.
–This is not true of the Cowboys. When Dallas is good, the league tends to schedule a cupcake.
–The strength of the opponent doesn’t explain everything. It turns out that the Lions are just bad on Thanksgiving. In the past 25 years the Lions have played 200 home games. Over that long period we can calculate the probability of a Lions victory as a function of the opponents winning percentage. So, making numbers up here because I don’t have the exact figures in front of me, when the opponent has a .500 record, the Lions have a 52% chance of winning, and when the opponent has a .625 record, the Lions have a 35% chance of winning. None of this is surprising, except for one thing: the Lions’ probability of winning on Thanksgiving is 8% lower than expected compared other home games. So to use the previous numbers, if the Lions have an overall 52% chance of winning a home game against a .500 team, the chance that they will beat that team on Thanksgiving is only 44%.
Whatever the reason, the Lions just stink by a significant margin on Thanksgiving, and the league isn’t helping us out the way they help the Cowboys.
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Nice. Thanks for the deep dive. Anecdotally I always thought that Dallas was getting much easier opponents on Thanksgiving than the Lions were. Talk about league bias. It’s right there in black and white. The league bends over backward to protect the image of their darling teams.
My big gripe, especially this season is how our team can’t get up for short week games. Or games after the bye. Or games after the mini-bye. I thought we would be more prepared in certain circumstances but injuries to starters must really really really take us off our mark. Meaning that improving the depth will never solve these problems.
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I think the number of out of cycle games we had this season can certainly be seen as part of it. Having to play games on 3 days rest, or 6 days rest, and then having 10 days off before the next game and then 8 days off for the next game. I personally hate the long layoffs as much as I hate the short rest days. To me it could very well be a reason to look at for all our injuries as well.
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Good points.
Exactly. I saw maybe 15 mins of the game yesterday. Just laughed and turned that crap off. Was a wonderful Christmas.
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I still would not be happy if we lost the TDay game. It is just too much a part of Michigan tradition.
I do think it is shitty to make the teams play on Christmas Day vs be with their families and wouldn’t care if we never played on Christmas again. That IS NOT a part of our DNA as Michiganders like the TDay game and wouldn’t miss that one bit. Especially if they are going to put it on BULLSHIT streaming services and make people that want to watch the game subscribe to a service they don’t want for any other day of the year.
This I agree with you 100%.
Thanksgiving always been a shit storm. I hate football on Xmas. I used to love the watching the stones play on it. And if they keep playing like this next year they will be playing on Xmas again .
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I like watching the Pistons on Xmas too. Hopefully next year. Did you see the Joker’s stat line from yesterday? 56 points, 16 rebounds, and 15 assists. He’s not human.
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