On Thanksgiving, November 28, 2019, the Chicago Bears beat the Detroit Lions 24-20 at Ford Field. Mitchell Trubisky threw for 338 yards and three touchdowns, the last a 3-yard pass to David Montgomery with 2:17 left. The game is remembered just as much for the man on the other side: David Blough, an undrafted rookie who found out the night before that he would make his first NFL start, and whose first completion went 75 yards for a touchdown.
The Bears came in at 5-6. The Lions were 3-7-1 and had lost four straight. Seven years later, the two teams meet again in Detroit on Thanksgiving, this time with the NFC North lead at stake.
A third-string rookie on 15 hours’ notice
Matthew Stafford had started every Lions game since the 2011 opener before a back injury sidelined him in November. Jeff Driskel started the next three games, then hurt his hamstring the Sunday before Thanksgiving in Washington. On Wednesday night, the Lions announced that Blough would start. He had come over from the Cleveland Browns in a trade at the end of the preseason and had never taken a snap in a regular-season game. He was the first undrafted rookie to start a game at quarterback for Detroit, not counting strike seasons.
“This is what you dream about as a kid,” Blough said after the game. “I’m thankful for it all. The ups and the downs. I knew there was going to be some, I wasn’t going to be perfect. I wanted to give everything I had and the guys lifted me up.”
Two drives, two touchdowns
Chicago scored first. Cordarrelle Patterson returned the opening kickoff 57 yards to midfield, and Trubisky completed four straight passes, the last a 10-yard touchdown to Allen Robinson. It was the Bears’ first touchdown on an opening drive in eight games.
Detroit’s first two plays went nowhere. Bo Scarbrough was stopped for no gain, and Blough bounced his first pass short of T.J. Hockenson. On third-and-10 from his own 25, Blough threw deep down the left side to Kenny Golladay, who was all alone after a mix-up in the Chicago secondary. Golladay ran the rest of the way for a 75-yard touchdown. It was the first touchdown the Bears had allowed on an opponent’s opening drive since October 2018, ending a 21-game streak that had been the longest active one in the league.
After a Chicago three-and-out, the Lions went 78 yards in 10 plays. Blough hit Marvin Jones Jr. for 19 yards and Golladay for 29, and finished the drive with an 8-yard touchdown pass to Jones across the middle. The Lions then tried an onside kick, and Jalen Reeves-Maybin recovered it at the Chicago 49. The Lions did not score after it, but with 4:12 left in the first quarter they led 14-7. Blough had completed 4 of 6 passes for 131 yards and two touchdowns, and the Ford Field crowd chanted “MVP.”
Matt Prater’s 25-yard field goal made it 17-7 with 3:13 left in the first half. Golladay set it up with a 34-yard catch to the Chicago 14.
Trubisky answers
Trubisky drove the Bears to the Detroit 12 before halftime, and Eddy Pineiro’s 30-yard field goal cut the lead to 17-10. Early in the third quarter, Darius Slay intercepted a pass intended for Robinson at the Detroit 22 and returned it 19 yards.
Trubisky did not let the interception linger. On the next drive he completed all six of his passes for 84 yards, with gains of 16 to Robinson, 20 and 12 to Miller and 12 more to Robinson, then threw an 18-yard touchdown pass down the middle to rookie tight end Jesper Horsted. That tied it at 17 with 4:51 left in the third quarter.
“To Mitch’s credit, he didn’t get rattled,” Bears coach Matt Nagy said. “We’ve been talking all season about the next play mentality, and that’s what he did.”
A shoestring tackle and a 90-yard drive
Detroit answered with a drive of almost nine minutes that reached the Chicago 5. On third-and-1, Kyle Fuller dropped J.D. McKissic for no gain with a shoestring tackle, and the Lions settled for Prater’s 24-yard field goal and a 20-17 lead with 10:51 left. Nagy later called Fuller’s stop “an absolute game-changer.”
The Bears got the ball back at their own 10 with 6:40 to play after a Lions punt. An ineligible-man-downfield penalty pushed them back to the 5. On third-and-4 from the 16, Trubisky threw deep down the left side to Miller for 35 yards. Three Montgomery runs gained 15 yards and left a third-and-5 at the Detroit 34, and Trubisky found Miller again, this time down the right side for 32 yards to the 2.
A delay-of-game penalty moved the ball back to the 7. Montgomery ran for 4, and on second-and-3 Trubisky looked to his first two options, then threw to Montgomery in the middle of the end zone. The drive covered 90 yards in nine plays. “David was third in the progression,” Nagy said. “That’s a growth for Mitchell.”
“They were dimes,” Miller said of the two long throws. “The ball was where it was supposed to be and all I had to do was make the play.” He finished with career highs of nine catches and 140 yards.
| Quarter | Time | Team | Scoring play | Score (CHI-DET) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1st | 11:43 | CHI | Allen Robinson 10-yard pass from Mitchell Trubisky (Eddy Pineiro kick) | 7-0 |
| 1st | 11:12 | DET | Kenny Golladay 75-yard pass from David Blough (Matt Prater kick) | 7-7 |
| 1st | 4:16 | DET | Marvin Jones Jr. 8-yard pass from Blough (Prater kick) | 7-14 |
| 2nd | 3:13 | DET | Prater 25-yard field goal | 7-17 |
| 2nd | 0:25 | CHI | Pineiro 30-yard field goal | 10-17 |
| 3rd | 4:51 | CHI | Jesper Horsted 18-yard pass from Trubisky (Pineiro kick) | 17-17 |
| 4th | 10:51 | DET | Prater 24-yard field goal | 17-20 |
| 4th | 2:22 | CHI | David Montgomery 3-yard pass from Trubisky (Pineiro kick) | 24-20 |
Fourth-and-22
Blough had 2:12 to answer, starting at his own 17. He moved the Lions to midfield with short passes to Danny Amendola and Hockenson and a 20-yard catch by Golladay on third-and-11. An offside penalty and an unnecessary-roughness penalty on Roquan Smith pushed Detroit to the Chicago 27 with 51 seconds left.
Smith then made up for it. After a 1-yard catch and an incompletion, he blitzed up the middle on third-and-9 and sacked Blough for a 13-yard loss. On fourth-and-22 from the Chicago 39 with 36 seconds left, Blough threw deep left for Golladay, and Eddie Jackson intercepted at the 10. It was Jackson’s first interception of the season. Trubisky took a knee, and the Bears celebrated in the locker room with the “Club Dub” dance party that had been a staple of their 12-4 season a year earlier.
“A lot of players made a lot of plays, but today was Mitch’s day,” Nagy said. “He did a lot of things today in regard to making special throws at special times.”
| Bears | Lions | |
|---|---|---|
| Quarterback | Mitchell Trubisky | David Blough |
| Completions-attempts | 29-38 | 22-38 |
| Passing yards | 338 | 280 |
| Touchdowns-interceptions | 3-1 | 2-1 |
| Times sacked | 1 | 2 |
| Top receiver | Anthony Miller, 9 for 140 | Kenny Golladay, 4 for 158 |
| Top rusher | David Montgomery, 16 for 75 | Bo Scarbrough, 21 for 83 |
| Total yards | 419 | 364 |
What came next
The win put Chicago at 6-6, the first time it had been back to .500 since 3-3. The Bears beat Dallas a week later, then lost to Green Bay and Kansas City and finished 8-8, out of the playoffs a year after winning the division.
Detroit’s loss was its fifth in a row, and the Lions did not win again that season. Blough started the last five games and lost all of them, and Detroit finished 3-12-1. Lions coach Matt Patricia was fired a year later, two days after another Thanksgiving loss at Ford Field.
The Bears had now won on Thanksgiving in Detroit in back-to-back years, after a 23-16 win in 2018, and they won there again 16-14 in 2021. The Lions finally broke through in 2024, when the Bears let the clock run out with a timeout in hand in a 23-20 loss, and Chicago fired Matt Eberflus the next day.
This year’s meeting
The teams meet at 1 pm ET on November 26, 2026, the opener of the Thanksgiving Day tripleheader in this year’s holiday slate, with Wu-Tang Clan at halftime. It is a very different matchup from 2019. Chicago (7-2) leads the NFC North by half a game over Detroit (6-2) entering Week 10 in the latest playoff picture, and Ben Johnson, who called plays for the Lions in the 2024 game, now coaches the Bears.
The scoring plays, clock times, drive details and player numbers above come from the official play-by-play and game data. The quotes are from postgame comments.
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