The Mercy Rule - Enjoy Your Robot Turkey

There are presumably still some Romney-fied families in these United States that spend their Thanksgiving afternoons engaged in giggling, good-natured, crisply executed touch football games in the front yard. But both anecdotal evidence and Department of Health data suggests that most Americans will spend Thanksgiving—or at least the portion of it preceding and following the ritual power-eating of yams and fibrous turkey meat—much the way we spend the rest of our days. That is, being peevish with each other, gobbling prescription painkillers like they're Mike and Ike's, and sweating slightly due to the exertion from the previous two activities. More power to the Mormons, marathoners and other Americans not currently turning themselves into Kardashian-obsessed bipedal foie-gras geese, of course. But the fact of the matter is that most of us are just not up to playing football on Thanksgiving, for reasons cardiovascular and otherwise. Most of us—whether we care about football or not, even if we don’t really watch it any other day of the year—are just going to watch NFL players do so on television.

As per usual, there will be plenty of football to watch during the day. That goofy animated robot on the Fox NFL broadcast will pull a little holiday overtime, and will doubtless be wielding a blunderbuss or chasing some robot turkey around or otherwise getting into the spirit in the dumbest of possible ways. The live action robots calling the game, from Beeker-headed human Ambien tablet Joe Buck on down to homo parmigianicus sideline guy Tony Siragusa, will be notably less animated, but they'll be there, too.

And the same teams that have been the NFL's Thanksgiving guests for generations will be there. The Detroit Lions, who played their first Thanksgiving game back in 1934 and have never quite recovered from the experience, will play first, as is the custom. (Contrary to the tradition, this year's competitive and amusingly asshole-ish Lions team is not guaranteed to lose by five touchdowns.) The Dallas Cowboys have next, as they have since 1966. It will happen this way because it always has, and it will be like this until the sun goes out, so it's probably worth getting used to it.

Ordinarily, this would be the part of the column in which I write a fuming, multi-parenthetical sentence about how frankly stupid most of the NFL's meatheaded because-it-has-always-been-thus folkways are. And I suppose I kind of just did. But while there are doubtless things NFL players would rather be doing on Thanksgiving than sustaining mild-to-moderate head trauma, Thanksgiving NFL is both endearing and familiar, despite the NFL's usual tendency towards We Are America pomp-overload.

Over their decades of Thanksgiving attendance, the Lions and Cowboys have taken on the aspect of benign-ish uncles. In years past, the Lions were frankly a bummer—at times a mustard-stained sad sack of an uncle and on occasion a creepo vagrant mumbling darkly from within a halo of fruit flies and bologna fumes. The Cowboys, good or bad, are always more or less the same type of uncle—frequently wrong, jet-engine loud, increasingly obnoxious, and blissfully blind towards their own fuck-up tendencies. The Corvette with the vanity plates in the driveway is theirs. If either team were a human, they'd be much less welcome as guests.

But they're football teams, and as such easily flipped-away-from or muted or otherwise ignored in favor of other things. There is and always will be Jenga or conversation or whiskey in the next room, after all. And if that doesn't sound good, there will always be the Lions and the Cowboys on the television, doing what they always do. These teams, and the nimbus of goofy ritual surrounding them, are flawed and strange and not-always-likable in the way of all Thanksgiving regulars; it is occasionally difficult to explain why they keep getting invited. But—and this is the actual, no-sarcasmo magic of the holiday—it's both baffling and actually kind of nice to see them every year all the same.

Previously - The No Basketball Association