How do NFL players who play today celebrate Thanksgiving?
Thanksgiving Day is and will always be a day of family celebration but what happens if you’re a player in the NFL and you’ve got to play on that day?
While it’s true that NFL players enjoy fame, prestige, and a massive paycheck, it would also be fair to say that the demands of playing a professional sport can be taxing even more so when it comes to family and friends, and the idea that one often has to be far away from them on important days. So, how do they cope?
The ways in which NFL players spend their Thanksgiving Day
As you prepare for Thanksgiving Day with your family and friends, spare a thought for the players of the NFL who will be missing the turkey and stuffing this year as they will be busy playing in NFL’s Week 12. Indeed, this Thanksgiving Day the league will be offering fans an exciting triple-header, followed by the first-ever Black Friday game, and then a slate of 11 games on Sunday i.e., all 32 teams will be in action this week and so many players will be away from those that they love. This brings us to the question of how they cope and moreover, what do they do?
According to former Ravens DE Ryan Riddle who is now with the Bleacher Report, “Family togetherness can often take the form of teammates turned friends sharing a makeshift turkey dinner in a half-empty apartment. Although I was away from my family, there was still something uniquely special about my first Thanksgiving in the NFL shared with a few fellow rookie teammates. It was odd spending this day designed for family with relative strangers, but it was also great to get to know guys on the team a little bit better outside of the football environment.” Riddle continued explaining, “There really is very little opportunity, if any, for most players who are far from home to fly back to their families for Thanksgiving. This may be the worst day of practice of the year, especially when that practice happens to be outdoors in the middle of a New York ice storm.”
OK, but surely NFL players do other things on Thanksgiving Day?
As a matter of fact they do. In general there are three common ways in which the NFL’s players spend their Thanksgiving Days which we’ve outlined below:
With the team
As explained by another former player, Matt Bowen, who is now with ESPN, it is actually a common practice among teams to have specific players or even coaches who host lunches or dinners. “Now, the cool thing about the pros is that everyone takes care of each other. Veteran players will open up their homes to the young cats. Some coaches, too. And everyone in the locker room makes sure that the guys have a place to go for the holiday. Practice starts much earlier in the day and players are out of the facility usually around 1 p.m. You try to keep as many traditions intact as possible. From the Cowboys’ late-afternoon kickoff to turkey around halftime, it’s a welcome break from the grind. And you need that as a player. But as the current NFL rooks will find out, it doesn’t compare to being home.”
Giving back to the community
If you can’t spend the moment with your family, why not make another family happy right? That seems to be the approach that is increasingly being taken by NFL players year after year. From turkey drives where they hand out stuffed birds to less fortunate members of the community, to gift runs during Christmas for children in need or in hospital, players of the NFL do a lot of work in the community during the holiday season. Most recently we saw former Colts player Shaquille Leonard who was released by the team on Tuesday and then proceeded to drive hours away to join his teammates in order to hand out turkeys. Such dedication in the face of being cut has got to be admired and is something we’re thankfully seeing more and more of each year.
The Thanksgiving Game
As mentioned above there are various ways in which teams compensate for the fact that they’ve got to play on Thanksgiving Day, but when all is said and done, gameday is gameday and with that the focus falls squarely on the job at hand as opposed to what’s on the dinner table. Consider for a moment that the Detroit Lions have hosted a Thanksgiving Day game for almost 90 years, while the Cowboys have done so for almost 60. Both will once again be in action this year as they face the Packers and Commanders respectively.