Thanksgiving Day football is every bit as traditional as sitting around the table with family, eating turkey, stuffing and pumpkin pie on the fourth Thursday of November. The tradition of playing football on the holiday is as old as the game itself, and nearly as old as the holiday.
In 1863, president Abraham Lincoln set a fixed date for the holiday of Thanksgiving for the first time, which beforehand was a sporadic holiday without a set date. Six years later in 1869, Rutgers and Princeton competed in what is considered the first organized game of American football. Two weeks later, the first Thanksgiving Day football game was played between the “Young America Cricket Club and the Germantown Cricket Club” in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.