NFL History | Ford Field, Detroit — The Radio Promotion That Became a Fixed Date

On Thursday 28 November 2002 the Detroit Lions lost to New England 20-12 at Ford Field before 62,109 people, in Pro-Football-Reference's account of the game. What the date records is not the result but that the Thanksgiving Day fixture had reached its fourth home ground, sixty-eight years after a radio executive scheduled it to get his club noticed.

The Pro Football Hall of Fame dates the tradition to 1934, when George A. Richards moved the Portsmouth Spartans to Detroit and renamed them the Lions. The Detroit Historical Society gives the purchase price as $7,952.08 and Richards's reason for wanting a holiday fixture: his first season's home crowds never passed fifteen thousand, in a city whose sporting attention belonged to the Tigers.

Richards owned WJR. The Pro Football Researchers Association records that he worked with the NBC Radio president Deke Aylesworth to carry the game over a network of ninety-four stations, a figure History.com also gives; History.com describes it as the first NFL game broadcast on a national radio network. The promotion and the broadcast were the same act: the man who put the fixture on the calendar also owned a station on the network that carried it.

The game was played at University of Detroit Stadium, which stadiumsofprofootball.com puts at twenty-five thousand seats. The Hall of Fame records twenty-six thousand tickets sold out a fortnight in advance; the Pro Football Researchers Association calls it the club's first sellout. Chicago won 19-16. Two accounts of the standings differ in emphasis rather than substance: History.com has the Bears arriving unbeaten at 11-0, and the Detroit Historical Society records that they finished the season 13-0. The deciding score came in the fourth quarter, a two-yard touchdown pass from Bronko Nagurski to Bill Hewitt. Nagurski is the same fullback whose forward pass at Chicago Stadium twenty-three months earlier is still disputed, and which this collection's entry on that arena describes.

## The date, and what it survived

The Hall of Fame records the Detroit game running without interruption apart from six seasons, 1939 through 1944, and gives 1966 as the year Dallas became the second annual host, missing only 1975 and 1977.

The buildings changed underneath it. Following stadiumsofprofootball.com, the Lions played at University of Detroit Stadium from 1934 to 1937, at Tiger Stadium — Briggs Stadium for much of that time — in 1938 and 1939 and again from 1941 to 1974, at the Pontiac Silverdome from 1975, and at Ford Field from 2002. For twenty-seven of those seasons the Detroit Thanksgiving game was not played in Detroit: Pontiac is a separate city about forty kilometres north.

The last outdoor home game the Lions played inside Detroit was itself a Thanksgiving game. Pro-Football-Reference records Denver beating Detroit 31-27 at Tiger Stadium on Thursday 28 November 1974. A date created to fill a stadium was also the date that closed one.

Set against the 1934 crowd, the 2002 attendance measures the distance travelled: roughly twenty-six thousand in a college ground, 62,109 in a building the club had opened that September.

## Status note, 5 September 2026

The holiday has since been extended in both directions. CBS Sports records a third Thanksgiving Day game added in 2006 and a Black Friday game from 2023, and reports that the 2026 season is scheduled to spread five games across the week: a Wednesday-evening game on Netflix on 25 November, three games on Thursday 26 November, and a Friday-afternoon game on 27 November. The Thursday afternoon fixture is scheduled as Chicago at Detroit, which is the 1934 pairing. That is a published schedule rather than a result, and should be re-checked after November 2026.

## Coordinate

The pin is 42.339957, -83.045617, with a precision radius of 150 metres, and it is the centre of the stadium footprint rather than a doorway.

Two separately maintained records were used and they disagree in the ordinary way. The United States Census Bureau's TIGER geocoder returns 42.338895, -83.046628 for 2000 Brush Street, about 144 metres to the south-west; that is an interpolation along a street address range, not a rooftop point. OpenStreetMap way 110555613, tagged as a stadium, carries a drawn outline spanning roughly 270 metres north to south and 282 metres east to west, and the pin is its centre. The stadium footprint is wider than the distance between the two answers. Wikidata's coordinate statement for Ford Field agrees with the drawn outline to within about seven metres, but it is given to two decimal places of latitude and is treated here as corroboration rather than as an independent leg. One caution worth stating: OpenStreetMap's United States street geometry derives historically from TIGER, so the two are not independent everywhere — the stadium polygon is a mapped building outline rather than an imported road, which is why it is used here.

Wikidata also carries an inception date of 24 August 2002 for the building, while stadiumsofprofootball.com gives 22 September 2002 as its opening. Nothing above rests on either figure.

## Cover image

Michigan Army National Guard soldiers holding the American flag during the national anthem at Ford Field, photographed by Sergeant James Larimer of the 220th Public Affairs Detachment on 17 November 2019 and released through DVIDS as image 5919661, VIRIN 191117-A-OT885-017, public domain. The name of the building is spelled across the ring in the frame, which is what identifies it. This is not a Thanksgiving game: Pro-Football-Reference records the fixture that day as Dallas beating Detroit 35-27 on a Sunday afternoon, eleven days before Thanksgiving 2019. The two clubs in the photograph are nonetheless the league's two annual Thanksgiving hosts.