Strategy Day: How to Win the Turkey Leg

A great Thanksgiving memory of mine is not only being with family and eating great food, but having the Detroilt Lions or Dallas Cowboys football games on in the background of the day of Thanks. The Thanksgivng Classic games have been a regular occurrence since the NFL’s inception in 1920. Here is some history related to the games, found at Wikipedia.

“The Lions have hosted a game each year since 1934 (excluding the years 1939-1944), and the Cowboys have hosted a game each year since 1966 (excluding 1975 and 1977 when the St. Louis Cardinals hosted a game instead).”

“The first owner of the Lions, G.A. Richards, started the tradition of the Thanksgiving Day game as a gimmick to get people to go to Lions football games, and to continue a tradition begun by the city’s previous NFL teams.^[1] It is widely rumored that the Cowboys sought a guarantee that they would regularly host Thanksgiving games as a condition of their very first one (since games on days other than Sunday were uncommon at the time and thus high attendance was not a certainty).”

“CBS was the first network to televise Thanksgiving games in 1956; in 1965, the first ever color television broadcast of an NFL game was the Thanksgiving match between the Lions and the Baltimore Colts.”

One of the best parts about the Thanksgiving Classics in recent years has been the inception and creation of the Turkey Leg Award. This award is an MVP award started by John Madden. “In 1989 (the year of the infamous Bounty Bowl), John Madden of CBS awarded the first “Turkey Leg Award,” for the game’s most valuable player. Reggie White of the Philadelphia Eagles was the first recipient. The gesture was seen mostly as a humorous gimmick relating to Madden’s famous multi-legged turduckens served on Thanksgiving. Since then, however, the award has gained subtle notoriety, and currently, each year an MVP has been chosen for both the CBS and FOX games. Madden brought the award to FOX in 1994, but it was abandoned and replaced with the “Galloping Gobbler” — a running silver turkey wearing a football helmet — when Madden left for ABC in 2002. When CBS returned to the NFL in 1998, they introduced their own award, the “All-Iron Award”, which is, suitably enough, a small silver iron, a reference to Phil Simms‘ All-Iron team for toughness. The All-Iron winner also receives a skillet of blackberry cobbler made by Simms’ mother.^[1]“

How can you win a MVP turkey leg this Thanksgiving? Spend time with your family. Help them cook the meal, enjoy their company and be thankful. This holiday is an opportunity to take our game plan and put it into effect on a big day, with family, where sometimes there’s a lot of love, and sometimes there’s not. Whatever the emotions on your holiday, they are intense. Rise to the occasion, hurdle the obstacles, step up and play well and show your family love and thanksgiving. That’s the essence of an MVP, one worthy of the Turkey Leg.