There are few things more objectionable to the trolls at Cold, Hard Football Facts.com than the concept of "moderation." Especially at holiday time. In all things, from our food intake to our alcohol consumption, from our ever-expanding girth to our football watching, the great unwashed masses of Planet Pigskin live by a simple creed: "More is better."

It's in this spirit that the Cold, Hard Football Facts offer a tip of the sweat-stained John Deere cap to the National Football League for the addition of a much needed third game to the traditional Thanksgiving lineup. And while we're in a giving mood, much of the credit for this magnificent advancement in human societal evolution goes to Lamar Hunt, the great gridiron visionary who looked at the world as it was, with a mere two Turkey Day games, and dared to ask, "Why can't there be more?" And thus, with the Denver-Kansas City game on Hunt's own hallowed ground at Arrowhead Stadium, our Thanksgiving pigskin intake was increased by a blessed 50 percent. (Of course, there was a time when there were FOUR pro football games on Thanksgiving. We'll continue to hold out hope.)

Thursday evening, as we began to wake from our tryptophan-induced coma only to realize that the NFL had given us a game to watch as we returned from the kitchen with our plates piled high with leftover turkey sandwiches, we paused a moment to put our gravy-stained hands together in prayerful thanks for some of the other great achievements in footballogy:

The forward pass

O.K., the Chief Troll is on the record for banning the forward pass. The rest of us think he's an idiot. It's the only thing separating football from rugby. While Eddie Cochem, the coach of St. Louis University, is credited with inventing the forward pass in 1906, it didn't become popular until 1913, when Notre Dame used it to defeat unbeaten Army at Yankee Stadium. The guy on the receiving end of most of those passes was a future Fighting Irish coach by the name of Knute Rockne. The backward pass, invented by Garo Yepremian and perfected by Drew Bledsoe, never caught on.

NFL Films

Ed Sabol was a man with a home movie camera and a dream. When he bid $3,000 for the rights to film the 1962 NFL Championship, his dream became reality ... and married gridiron romanticism to millions of football fans who have come to love the NFL through his company's artwork. When he hired John "The Voice of God" Facenda, he changed the world of sports forever. If you call yourself a football fan but you don't get goosebumps when you hear "it begins with a whistle and it ends with a gun," then just go ahead and move back to France, Pinko. Also, you gotta watch the new NFL Films "America's Game" broadcasts on NFL Network. Their best work yet.

The first-down line

Ordinarily, the inhabitants of Cold, Hard Football Facts are adverse to lines of any kind, due to the times we've spent walking them during field sobriety tests. But the yellow line, superimposed over the playing field to signify the first-down marker, is the greatest advancement in line technology since the invention of the all-you-can-eat buffet line.

The referee microphone

There are fewer and fewer among us who are old enough to remember the dark days before game officials were wired into the stadium PA system. Knowing what penalty was just called used to require the ability to read NFL semaphore. With the zebra microphone, however, not only are we told what the the infraction is, we know exactly which player committed it and the target of our screaming fits of booze-fueled rage is no longer a matter of guesswork.

The turkey fryer

All through American history, there was only one thing missing from our enjoyment of Thanksgiving football: saturated fats. Now, thanks to the anonymous heroes who labored tirelessly perfecting the back porch fryolater, we're able to cook a bird in 30 minutes that on the outside will be crisp as a Joe Montana pass and on the inside as moist as a troll's eyes when Rudy gets his acceptance letter from Notre Dame. And we can take part in our annual ritual of decadent gluttony, safe in the knowledge that the last healthy part of the meal has been replaced with greasy goodness.

 

What a brilliant concept: Roll up to the biggest game of the weekend and host a show in front of 10,000 screaming college kids, outside a 105,000-seat stadium. It's the best pregame show on TV. Sadly, the Notre Dame-USC game Saturday was the last on-location College GameDay broadcast of the year. But hey! Just nine months 'til kickoff 2007.

The 10-minute ticker

Was there really ever a time when you couldn't get instant, up-to-the-second scores and stats of the other games in progress? How did we live like that?

"NFL PrimeTime"

Now that NBC has the Sunday night games, ESPN's signature pigskin highlight show has moved on and is called something else. Sure, it was a complete ripoff of Howard Cosell's old MNF halftime highlights, and Chris Berman stopped writing new material around the first Clinton administration, but for 20 years, it was the best hour of programming on TV.

The DVR

We thought the DVR would be a time saver: We could record the game and fast forward through the commercials. Instead, it takes twice as long to watch since there's not a troll among us who isn't rewinding plays to watch them in super slo-mo to figure out just how in hell LaDainian Tomlinson got through that hole. Still, anything that lets us pause live television when our mother-in-law cluelessly calls in the middle of the fourth quarter deserves our praise. And the DVR has made the dreaded "commercial after the kickoff after the commercial after the field goal" a thing of the past.

The NFL Network

The question "How much damned football can the pigskin public stand?" was finally answered when the league launched its own cable channel on November 4, 2003. And the answer is: We can handle it 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. From "NFL Total Access" to "Cheerleader Playoffs" to anything featuring Jamie Dukes, who has quickly established himself as the best new analyst in football, the NFL Network gives the pigskin troll more pleasure than anything on cable since the invention of late-night Skinemax.

The Cold, Hard Football Facts never sleep in the quest to find football perfection. A third Thanksgiving Day game is but a step on that journey. A fourth game would get us that much closer to the dream.