Ah, Thanksgiving – a day in which to be thankful for great food and football, right?
While football fans will be busy stuffing their face with, well, stuffing, the Patriots will be at work in Detroit, trying to get their ninth win of the season.
Yes, football and Thanksgiving go together like turkey and gravy.
The Pats will be focused on the pigskin, and not pigging out at home, but you can bet they did their fair share of it growing up. Rookie tight end Rob Gronkowski is just one of three brothers all currently in the NFL. If you thought you had a big dinner, imagine what his mother had to go through.
“In high school it was just my whole family getting together,” Gronkowski said. “My mom would just cook a big turkey and lots of food and we’d just have the whole family over and it would be crazy. It took her like three days to cook it all.”
Cornerback Kyle Arrington’s house was the place to be for Thanksgiving, as his entire family would come over.
“We would have a regular turkey, and we would have a smoked turkey,” Arrington said. “So that was great, we had two big turkeys. Macaroni and cheese, candy yams, greens, devilled eggs – the works. It was awesome; it was definitely a good seven pounds that day.”
High school football is just as big on Thanksgiving as the NFL is, and linebacker Rob Ninkovich couldn’t get enough of it even once he graduated.
“Usually every Thanksgiving, me and my high school teammates would go play football in our high school field,” he said. “Even when I was in junior college we went and played and they were like three years out of playing football.”
