Which NFL Thanksgiving Rivalry Is the Bitterest?

The teams playing in this Thanksgiving’s three NFL games have bad blood — or do they? We find out which rivalries are hottest, and which are mostly hype

The tradition of the Thanksgiving Day football game is nearly as old as football itself, with Ivy League schools holding their championship games on the holiday starting in 1876. And while Thanksgiving may celebrate community and togetherness, this particular tradition has seen some of the most bitter rivalries in sports history. That’s not going to change this year, as all three games scheduled for the Thanksgiving holiday will pit division rivals with a good deal of history against one another.

But some of these feuds between teams began over 50 years ago, and things tend to change quickly in the world of professional sports. Do fans of the Packers and Lions, Cowboys and Commanders, or 49ers and Seahawks really despise each other’s teams? Or are these rivalries a tad outdated and out of step with today’s NFL audience? We used Ranker Insights to look at the fanbases for each of these six teams and found some surprising results.

Cowboys vs. Commanders

Our first finding was probably the most shocking: according to Ranker Insights, fans of the Commanders and Cowboys are actually almost 3X more likely to vote up one another’s teams on our list of The Greatest NFL Teams (174K votes). That means fans of one team in one of the most infamous rivalries in sports are actually more likely to like the other team!

A caveat: measuring affinities between two different sports teams is a little different than it is for measuring it between different TV shows or movies. When you visit a list of great movies, you might upvote a movie here, another there, and downvote ones you happen to dislike. When you’re visiting a list of rival sports teams, fans have a tendency to upvote their favorite team and downvote virtually every other team on the list. The fact that a lot of people downvoted both the Commanders AND the Cowboys certainly contributed to this affinity.

But Insights is still effective at recognizing enmity between sports fanbases. For instance, it tells us that those who love the New York Yankees are 5X more likely to dislike the Boston Red Sox, while those who love the Pittsburgh Penguins are 2X more likely to dislike the Washington Capitals. 

The Commanders and the Cowboys have a positive affinity because, while a large number of voters have downvoted both teams, the number of people who have upvoted them is 14% higher than the number of people who’ve voted the one team over the other. Neither team has won a Super Bowl in almost 30 years, so it could be that the stakes of their rivalry seem lower, leading the enmity between the fan bases to cool. 

Lions vs. Packers

This rivalry was forged through Thanksgiving games — from 1951 to 1963, these two teams played each other on the holiday every year. The divide between the two fan bases is most intense in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a dividing line between the west, where Packers fans tend to live, and the east, where Lions territory begins. 

Fans of the Packers are 2X more likely to dislike the Minnesota Vikings, another regional rival, while fans of the Lions are 2X more likely to dislike the Cleveland Browns. Given the esoteric nature of this “Yooper” rivalry, and with the Packers such a consistently competitive force in recent years while the Lions remain a consistently unlucky one, it’s perhaps no surprise that there’s no real rivalry between these two teams. 

It does merit mentioning that, unlike with the Commanders and Cowboys, there’s no significant number of voters upvoting both teams on any list. Even though these two fan bases are relatively close to one another, there isn’t any significant overlap. Still, the fact that this will be the first Thanksgiving game the Packers have played without Aaron Rodgers in 15 years seems to be the only exciting reason for fans outside of the Great Lakes region to tune into this matchup. 

Seahawks vs 49ers

Probably the freshest of the football feuds covered in this blog, the San Francisco 49ers and Seattle Seahawks didn’t become NFC West rivals until 2002. The rivalry began to really gain momentum around 2011, when former Stanford coach Jim Harbaugh took leadership over the 49ers. With former USC coach Pete Carroll taking the head coach job for the Seahawks the previous year, the hire intensified the competition between the two professional teams by bringing a fierce NCAA rivalry to the NFL. 

In support of our theory, it seems that the more recent rivalries are the ones felt by the fans: those who love the 49ers are statistically less likely to also be fans of the Seahawks. Though the affinity is only mildly negative, the number of people who vote up one team and not the other is nearly 20% higher than the number of people who upvoted both teams. Though the contentiousness between these two teams has calmed since its 2010s heyday, it’s clearly still fresh in the minds of fans voting on lists like The Best Sports Franchises Of All Time (222K votes) and Who Will Win NFL Super Bowl LVIII In 2024? (2K votes). 

These stories are crafted using Ranker Insights, which takes over one billion votes cast on Ranker.com and converts them into actionable psychographics about pop culture fans across the world. To learn more about how our Ranker Insights can be customized to serve your business needs, visit insights.ranker.com, or email us at insights@ranker.com.

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