On Thanksgiving Day, the Dallas Cowboys and New York Giants will resume a rivalry that spans decades. Between them, these two franchises have won nine Super Bowls. They’ve faced each other 124 times, a history that helped convince the NFL to keep Dallas in a division called the NFC East despite whatever offense that may have caused for geography teachers.
The other end of the NFL’s Thanksgiving tradition belongs to the Detroit Lions. The Lions have spent 95 seasons as a pro team. They’ve never been to a Super Bowl. Between 1985 and 2015, while the Cowboys and Giants combined for seven world titles, Detroit won exactly one playoff game.
This has shifted the balance of those Thanksgiving staples. The Lions played the game you could ignore while prepping sides. The Cowboys were for beers and couch-assisted digestion, the game folks at least appeared to care about.
This will not be the case in 2024.
Sources: The New York Giants are expected to replace Daniel Jones with Tommy DeVito as their new starting quarterback. pic.twitter.com/pVLVWVNDBY
— Adam Schefter (@AdamSchefter) November 18, 2024
This year’s Giants-Cowboys tilt was always going to be moderately underwhelming. Dak Prescott struggled this fall despite signing the league’s richest contract extension last summer. Daniel Jones remained unable to capture the balance that led him to an honest-to-god playoff win in 2022.
2024’s Thanksgiving game won’t feature either. Instead, it will be a showdown between Cooper Rush and Tommy DeVito.
DeVito has thrown for more than 200 yards once in six NFL starts. Rush has been in the league since 2017 and started seven total games. If you take every quarterback to have played at least 98 snaps since 2023, you get a list of 62 players. When it comes to expected points added (EPA) per snap, neither DeVito nor Rush would crack the top 55.
This isn’t merely bad luck. This is the football gods showing us the sport is a zero sum game. The sudden or prolonged spirals of the Cowboys and Giants are a cantilever. They lay the base so the Detroit Lions can soar. And so, we’re getting the NFL’s most explosive offense on Turkey Day, not from CeeDee Lamb or Saquon Barkley (who New York let leave in free agency for a different NFC East rival), but from a Detroit team that’s scored 40 points or more in four of its last seven games.
The Lions are bottled excitement. But to hammer home the DeVito news they needed a worthy opponent. That’s not quite the Chicago Bears, but it *could* be. The Bears sacrificed offensive coordinator Shane Waldron in an effort to revive Caleb Williams’s potential as a franchise quarterback. We’ve only seen one game of what that looks like, but the early returns are positive.
Caleb Williams, good again pic.twitter.com/Iz0gAB3XFW
— Christian D'Andrea (@TrainIsland) November 17, 2024
This means the early game could be a shootout between the NFL’s top offense and an electric young passer capable of whipping darts downfield or taking off and jetting past linebackers for big gains. That’s all very important, because the best quarterback on Thanksgiving’s late afternoon game may be this guy:
"it's Cooper Rush time" Cooper Rush whispered quietly to himself before stepping up in the pocket and delivering a perfect strike to the turf two yards in front of his fullback pic.twitter.com/7JX3F5OsL7
— Christian D'Andrea (@TrainIsland) November 10, 2024
So we’ve got to enjoy Bears-Lions while we can. Rush-DeVito will be waiting. You may want to talk politics or religion on the couch instead.
