Happy Thanksgiving and Go Blue!
Thanksgiving football!? Forget about the Detroit Lions and Dallas Cowboys. Like football in general, it all started in the college game and your beloved Wolverines had a big hand in this tradition.
From 1885 to 1905 Michigan football played regularly on Thanksgiving. And most of those were HUGE match-ups in the Windy City with then-rival Amos Alonzo Stagg and his Chicago Maroons.
Here’s a snapshot of Michigan football’s Thanksgiving Day games – each played on the last Thursday in November:
All told U-M played 17 games with Michigan and came out on top 9 times. All but two games were played in Chicago (with just a single tilt in Ann Arbor, the other in Cleveland.)
Notables games in Michigan football Thanksgiving history:
- 1887 – Played a day after U-M taught Notre Dame how to play football in South Bend.
- 1896 – The first football game that was played indoors, and fact they actually used electric lights to illuminate the action when it was too dark inside.
- 1898 – Michigan’s first Big Ten championship, the game that inspired Louis Elbel to write The Victors.
- 1903 – A huge match-up with Stagg that again settled the conference title and made it three-straight for Yost against Chicago.
- 1905 – The 2-0 loss to Chicago ended Fielding Yost’s 56-game (55-0-1) unbeaten streak.
Officially Thanksgiving? After my original post, my friend John U. Bacon pointed out that the Thanksgiving holiday wasn’t nationally standardized until decades later. Either way, it’s clear that folks in the country, at least the Midwest, recognized these Thursday games as being played on the holiday. They went as far as printing ‘Thanksgiving’ or ‘Thanksgiving Day’ on tickets and other materials for these games. Along with the 1898 ticket leading this post above, here are a few other T-day game artifacts:
Happy Thanksgiving! Go Lions!
