That's not true everywhere. Thanksgiving football still is a big deal to Haddonfield and Haddon Heights, to Vineland and Millville, to lots of river towns that have been sending their teenage boys into these games since before World War II.
But in a larger sense, this great tradition might be played out. I'm starting to think many of these games are becoming an anachronism – a remnant of a bygone era like a phone booth or fax machine.
It's not just that attendance has been rapidly declining at almost all the games for the last 10 or 15 years. That's the reason many schools are moving the games to Wednesday nights.
And it's not just that the playoffs are far more important. The tournament began to marginalize Thanksgiving Day games when the NJSIAA introduced the postseason system in 1974, and squeezed those games a little more to the edges when fields were doubled to eight teams in 1998.
No program is built to win a Thanksgiving game. No coach considers these games more important than winning a division title or qualifying for the playoffs or capturing a tournament crown.
Delsea, Moorestown, Eastern, Highland, Maple Shade, and Winslow Township don't play on Thanksgiving weekend anymore. Nobody around those programs seems all that upset.
The cold truth is that Thanksgiving Day has never been a big deal in the Lenape district. Those schools are younger, with zero ties to the pre-playoff era. They are about winning championships, not beating the big rival in the big holiday game.
That's true in many of the larger, regional schools that were built as the first baby boomers hit the teenage years in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Their rivalries don't stretch back over the decades. And the very nature of those schools - which sprung up in response to housing developments filled with people who moved from someplace else - limits the generational ties associated with Thanksgiving football.
