NFL: Thanksgiving Football!! 3 Games Today!!

Posted by Sabrina B. @gametimegirl

Thanksgiving Football!!! Gotta LOVE family, food & football on Thanksgiving!!! We got 3 good games today starting at 12:30 with Packers at Lions on Fox. The second game is Dolphins at Cowboys at 4:15 on CBS and the night game is 49ers at Ravens is at 8:20p on the NFL Network.
Check out what Peter King from SI.com has to say about all 3 games after the jump…

12:30 p.m. ET: Green Bay (10-0) at Detroit (7-3). The Detroit game has always been the wasteland game. Eat early folks! Lions are down 30 in the third quarter! Not now. I can’t imagine the combined record of the two teams in the early game being 17-3. By my imprecise calculations, the last time the Lions played a game with a better combined record on Thanksgiving was 1962, when the 10-0 Packers came to Tiger Stadium on a windy and chilly day to play the 8-2 Lions.

Detroit corners Dick LeBeau (yes, that Dick LeBeau) and Night Train Lane picked off Bart Starr on that Thanksgiving Day 49 years ago, and Detroit handed Green Bay its only loss of a 13-1 championship season.

Back to the future: Detroit scored 49 and won for the second time in six weeks Sunday, and with the Bears on their heels, the Lions will be playing this one like a playoff game. If the season ended today, Detroit’s the fifth seed in the NFC playoffs and Chicago the sixth. A fourth loss puts the Lions into Falcons/Giants/Cowboys tiebreaker land.

4:15 p.m.: Miami (3-7) at Dallas (6-4). Dolphins and Cowboys are 6-0, combined, over the last three weeks. Much to my surprise (and your disgust, as I’m sure I’ll find out), the Dolphins enter the Fine Fifteen this week because they are just mashing teams this month. Dallas, tied with the Giants atop the NFC East, now has a clear edge in the division race because of the schedule. The Cowboys have Miami and offensively challenged Arizona in the next two weeks; the Giants have the Saints and Packers. But Miami looked a lot more beatable a couple of weeks ago. For those with a love of football history, it might be nice to see snow Thursday in Dallas — and Leon Lett.

8:20 p.m.: San Francisco (9-1) at Baltimore (7-3). “Forget the brother thing — this is going to be a really good game,” said Ravens coach John Harbaugh after Baltimore survived the Bengals Sunday. “I don’t think I’m going to think about that while we’re out there. They’re such a good team. I love their team. I love their [defensive] front. They’ll be really tough to prepare for.”

San Francisco could be playing to tie Green Bay for the league’s best record by nightfall. I haven’t been much into the Harbaugh Bowl thing, but it’s going to be fun. Saw a snippet of the NFL Network’s feature on the Harbaugh family that will run on the network’s pregame coverage Thursday, and it’s interesting how much of their football-coaching Dad the two boys have taken with them to the NFL.

Jack Harbaugh, schooled under Bo Schembechler, used to say to the boys that the three most important things in football coaching are the team, the team and the team. And so Jim Harbaugh put that on the wall of the team meeting room at the 49ers. And John Harbaugh, when introduced as head coach of the Ravens, repeated his dad’s mantra. This will be, by the way, the first time in the 92-year history of the NFL that two brothers head-coach against each other.

The NFL never thought last spring when making this schedule that the league would be leaving only the leftovers for the 12 Sunday games. That’s what’s happened. Only one of next Sunday’s games (Chicago at Oakland) pairs two teams with winning records. And the three Thursday games have six teams with a combined 42-18 record. The Harbaugh Bowl looked nice as a family story, but not as a football game, not with the Niners being the latter-day Niners. We saw the Lions coming. But the Pack, flawless?

I was surprised Sunday to hear Green Bay coach Mike McCarthy talk about how much he liked playing the Thanksgiving game. “We’re pretty experienced at it — this will be our third time in six years,” he told me. Third time in five, actually. Green Bay played at Detroit on Thanksgiving in 2007 and 2009.

“I love playing on Thanksgiving,” McCarthy said. “I think the players really like it too. Our battle cry here has been, ‘Three games in 11 days.’ It’s an honor to play on the holiday. And it gives the players something to look forward to — a break in the season. It’s human nature to look for the light at the end of the tunnel, and once we play this game, our guys can get a couple extra days to rest. I think they like the quick turnaround anyway.”

After we spoke, McCarthy was headed up to his office to finish game-planning for Detroit. “We get their game [on digital video] in at 9 o’clock tonight,” he said. Today and tomorrow, and early Wednesday, the coaches will install the game plan. “It’s just a one-hour flight,” said McCarthy, “so we’ll leave a little later than usual Wednesday and be ready to go.”

The six teams will have mini-bye-weeks after the games. If you can survive the quick turnaround, playing on Thanksgiving is a big edge for your last five weeks of the season.

FULL STORY AT SI.com  – By Peter King