Good luck finding someone who had a worse Thanksgiving than Raiders coach Jon Gruden. Despite his team not even playing, Gruden ended up looking like the biggest turkey of the holiday because he managed to see a couple of guys he traded away blow up on the biggest regular season football stage of the year and he lost some draft capital in the process. 

Khalil Mack, who Gruden dealt to the Bears before the season for a pair of future first-round picks, didn't put up a monster stat line for Chicago, but he did heavily impact the game (as he always does and has always done) en route to helping lead the Bears to their third divisional victory in the last 13 days. Mack has spent the season transforming the Bears' defense and it's turned them into viable contenders. Gruden has spent the entire season lamenting the lack of pass rush for the Raiders. 

The Mack thing is really nothing new though: Mack has been lighting up opposing offenses for the entire season and the Raiders have been getting killed for it. (Watch the Raiders play at the Ravens on Sunday at 1 p.m. ET on CBS, stream on CBS All Access or fuboTV, try it for free.) But the Bears were specifically chosen by the Raiders for the Mack trade because Oakland believed they represented the best opportunity to land future high draft picks. Whoops. The Bears are locked for the playoffs and perhaps more (additional info on that in a second) and Gruden's gonna end up getting No. 20 overall at best for a generational pass rusher. 

What is new is the Raiders looking foolish for dealing Amari Cooper. Cooper was shipped to Dallas for a first-round pick and, quite honestly, it seemed like a ripoff for the Raiders. Thanksgiving did not help the Raiders' cause: Cooper was the difference for the Cowboys, catching seven passes for 176 yards and a pair of touchdowns and creating plenty of glee in Jerry Jones' owner's box.

I'm confident you can find proof that I killed the Cowboys for giving up a first-round pick in the deal to get Cooper, but Dallas now controls the NFC East (more on that as well shortly) and you have to -- sigh -- give Jerry Jones credit for swinging big and at the very least hitting a ground rule double here. Right now Cooper likes like he could swing an entire division by opening up the Cowboys offense. 

Gruden's lucky Bruce Irvin didn't finish with 12 sacks of Drew Brees on Thursday. 

Catch the entire Thanksgiving Day recap, including R.J. White and Sean Wagner-McGough talking Cowboys vs. Redskins and Bears vs. Lions, on the Pick Six Podcast, and be sure to click the subscribe button below:

The East goes through Dallas

So about those Cowboys -- man, who could have seen this coming? Not me. Maybe Jerry? This was a 3-4 team heading into its bye that traded for Cooper, promptly lost on Monday night at home to a lethargic-looking Titans team and appeared dead in the water. Now they control their destiny in a very muddled NFC East. Credit the Cowboys for rallying over the last three weeks, with wins in Philly and Atlanta (tough to play no matter who the competition is) punctuated by a statement victory at home on Thanksgiving against the Redskins. 

Washington probably should have covered and Colt McCoy gave them some nice plays before handing the game away, but Dallas was by far the better team. Washington's defensive line came to play and Ezekiel Elliott still managed to top 100 rushing yards. It says a lot about how the Cowboys offensive line is playing right now. If you picked the Redskins or bet on the Redskins, you were holding your breath every time Zeke carried the ball, because he looked capable of a jailbreak at any minute. "When so and so rushes X times" stats can be misleading, but Brady Quinn has mentioned it multiple times on the Pick Six Podcast (a daily NFL podcast, go ahead and subscribe right here), the Cowboys have a magic number of 22: when Zeke carries the ball 22 times, the Cowboys win. 

It might very well be as simple as "when Zeke gets that many carries it's because the Cowboys are winning" but I also think there's a large amount of balance that Elliott toting the rock well creates in terms of allowing Dak Prescott to find his rhythm and hit open receivers. 

The Cowboys' next three games are tough; they draw the Saints and Eagles at home before playing the Colts on the road. They could go 0-3 and Philly or Washington could sneak right back into the divisional discussion. 

Jason Garrett's been smirking for 18 straight days -- the Cowboys' win streak took him from being on the chopping block to being in the extension zone. I still think his hyper-conservative coaching style will cost the Cowboys in a big way at some point, but in a division of blind men, the Cowboys appear to have a single eye and that could make them king.

More All-Star Officials

Two points to ding the NFL for its officials on, involving a single play, one that potentially affected the outcome of the Redskins-Cowboys game and almost certainly affected the gambling outcome of the game. On a third down near the red zone while trailing 11 points and needing two scores, the Redskins threw a pass to Jordan Reed that appeared to be complete, setting up a first-and-goal.

And then Reed got absolutely slobberknocked by Xavier Woods on a very obvious helmet-to-helmet hit.

There is NO denying this. Woods should have been flagged. Everyone watching agreed, both Joe Buck and Troy Aikman agreed, Fox rules analyst Mike Pereira agreed and yet no flag was thrown. As a result, the Redskins kicked a field goal to cut the lead to eight points and failed to cover after the Cowboys recovered. 

Now, I don't believe the refs had any real interest in influencing the outcome of the game or the point spread of the game. But I do think, now that gambling is becoming more and more legal and more and more commonplace, that the NFL needs to take a hard look at making sure things like that, in which the outcome of the game and the point spread of the game are clearly influenced, are fairly adjudicated, otherwise it becomes difficult to believe in the product. 

Bears back it right up

The Bears did not dominate the Lions on Thanksgiving the way they dominated the Lions two weeks earlier, but in a weird way, that might have been Chicago's most impressive effort of the season. 

For starters, Chicago was playing that game on the shortest rest imaginable. They beat the Vikings at home Sunday in prime time the week before, meaning the Bears kicked off at 8:20 p.m. ET on Sunday and then again at 12:30 p.m. ET on Thursday. For you math majors, that means they had 100 hours, 10 minutes between kickoffs. That's as short a split between games as I can recall seeing and the Bears won both games. In fact, the second Lions win was their third divisional victory in 13 days. Think about that for a second. 

Secondly, the Bears won without their quarterback. Mitchell Trubisky was nursing a sore AC joint he suffered late against the Vikings, so the Bears sat him and rolled with backup Chase Daniel. It was a prudent move for the long-term vision of the franchise and the investment in Daniel paid off. He wasn't dominant or explosive, but he got the job done. Daniel looked exactly like what you want a high-priced backup QB to look like. 

Finally, their defense is just so stout. We're all underselling it, maybe because defense doesn't matter as much in the year of the Rams vs. Chiefs taking our breath away. Or at least it doesn't feel like it matters as much. Every week there's someone else making a play for the Bears -- Eddie Jackson scored another defensive touchdown Thursday, giving him as many touchdowns as Julio Jones on the season. 

Jackson's touchdown was the fifth of his career, giving him the most defensive touchdowns in the NFL since 2015. He was drafted in 2017.

Mashing the Lions around doesn't give us a perfect portrait of what the Bears the can do against high-powered offenses, but since losing back-to-back games coming out of the bye, the Bears have won five-straight games and not allowed anyone to score over 20 points. 

This team is going to the playoffs and it's going to host a playoff game when it wins the NFC North. The only question is how far the Bears can go. I'm of the belief there's no ceiling, which is something I thought before the Bears went into Detroit on super short rest and won with Daniel under center.

Bow down to Brees

Wrote it about at length here, but there's a very good argument that Drew Brees is the MVP favorite by a clear margin at this point. The Saints are the best team in football -- I told you that last week and Thanksgiving was only further proof of it -- and they are coming together on defense in a big way right now, even after losing Marcus Davenport. Cam Jordan and Sheldon Rankins are wrecking shop on a weekly basis. 

Back to Brees, though: he threw four touchdown passes on Thursday and every single one was to an undrafted free agent. In having his quarterback dial up scoring plays to ...

*CHECKS NOTES* *USES GOOGLE*

... Dan Arnold, Austin Carr, Keith Kirkwood and Tommylee Lewis, it's almost like Sean Payton was reminding the world that his quarterback has always been as good as Tom Brady and Peyton Manning and Aaron Rodgers and he's always been doing what he does with less weapons. Those guys all played with multiple Hall of Fame weapons; Brees' best option in his career is either Jimmy Graham, Marques Colston or maybe even Michael Thomas. 

If the Saints secure the No. 1 seed and Brees maintains the pace he's on in terms of yards, touchdowns and interceptions, he is going to win the award. In the event of people being split on who to vote for, Brees would get the lifetime achievement tiebreaker over Patrick Mahomes. 

The next five weeks should be a coronation for a 39-year-old quarterback somehow playing what might be the best season of an all-time career. 

Celebrate good times

Thanksgiving is always a time of celebration and the NFL -- which is hilariously embracing touchdowns parties after shunning them for years -- got a mouthful of them on Thursday. Let's run through some of the best.

Zeke Elliott dropped money in the Salvation Army kettle, harkening back to his Christmas move last year when the Cowboys running back jumped in the kettle.

And then Elliott would later pick up Dak Prescott and throw his compatriot in the tin.

Amari Cooper got in on the party, mimicking Markelle Fultz's free-throw shot, which should be an insult except Fultz apparently loved the celebration. 

Eddie Jackson made the Bears do WORK.

The Bears defense also paid an incredible homage to Motown, while playing in Detroit.

And perhaps the most impressive one of all? Trey Quinn of the Redskins busted out "The Scarn" from the Office. 

Michael Scott approves.