The Dallas Cowboys have a long and storied history of being featured on Thanksgiving Day, but for two years in the 1970s, the Cowboys were replaced by the then-St. Louis Cardinals.
NFL replaced the Cowboys with the Cardinals on Thanksgiving twice in the 1970s
The Cardinals had a brief shot in the 1970s to establish themselves as a featured Thanksgiving Day team. It didn’t go so well.
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Jeanna Kelley has been covering the Falcons for The Falcoholic since 2011 and the NFL for SB Nation since 2015.
Since 1966, the Cowboys have been featured on Thanksgiving Day in every season except for 1975 and 1977, when Dallas was replaced by the St. Louis Cardinals. Not the baseball team, because that would be really weird. We’re talking about the other football team that used to be in St. Louis.
The Cardinals had moved from Chicago to St. Louis in 1960, and they didn’t make the postseason once until 1974. Still, after a couple of losses for the Cowboys on Thanksgiving in 1972 and 1973 and an improbable one-point win in 1974 when backup quarterback Clint Longley took over for an injured Roger Staubach and led Dallas to a come-from-behind, 24-23 victory over Washington, the NFL decided to give America a break from the Cowboys on Thanksgiving Day.
St. Louis hosted the Buffalo Bills in 1975, and it went poorly. The Bills dominated, winning 32-14. It was one of only three games the Cardinals lost all season.
The Cowboys were back in the mix the following season, and the Cardinals hosted Dallas in St. Louis. The Cowboys got the best of the Cardinals, winning 19-14.
In 1977, the Cardinals hosted the Miami Dolphins, and this game may have been enough reason for the NFL to scrap the whole Cardinals on Thanksgiving Day experiment. Miami beat St. Louis with a ridiculous final score of 55-10, and that was the end of the Cardinals replacing the Cowboys as a featured team on Thanksgiving.
Nobody seems to know why the NFL decided to make a switch and feature the Cardinals instead of the Cowboys for those two games, but Dallas is certainly entrenched as a Thanksgiving staple today.
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