The problem you alluded to in your last sentence will unfortunately just take a generation growing up with good Illini football teams, IMO. Too many Illini fans (especially ones outside of the Champaign MSA) view that game as an inconvenience on a holiday weekend, and that is of course VERY unfortunate ... we need to get to the point where a long Thanksgiving Weekend and Illini Football are intertwined! For perspective, I am back at my parents every year in Iowa City for Thanksgiving. EVERY Friday after Thanksgiving, whether the game is in Lincoln or Iowa City, I party with all of my friends for the Iowa/Nebraska game - either tailgating in the cold or drinking in a bar. I'm not even an Iowa fan, but I look forward to it each year. On an even bigger scale, do you think any Michigan/OSU or Alabama/Auburn fans would miss that last game on Thanksgiving Weekend?? I've heard two main arguments for why the NU game will rarely if ever pull a big crowd.
Part of the problem is our ~rival~ Northwestern just isn't very exciting ... however, a lot of the teams we SHOULD be final-weekend-rivals with already have rivalries that we won't replace (namely, Iowa/Nebraska or Wisconsin/Minnesota). We blew our chance at that one with years of sucking and partial bad luck that our only other instate team is a tiny private school with few fans and a historic tradition of sports futility ... so, unfortunately, that isn't going to change.
The other problem I see people cite is that too much of our fan base lives far away, especially the thousands and thousands of Illini alumni/fans in the St. Louis and especially Chicago MSAs; they are unlikely to drive to Champaign on that weekend, especially vs. a rival they perceive as lame and (way too often) for an Illini team whose season is over). I went into detail in another post that there are significantly more people within a 1-hour drive of Champaign than there are West Lafayette or Iowa City (both of which outdraw us regularly, with Iowa putting almost 70k in the stands the DAY after Thanksgiving ever year...), so I don't actually buy this argument either! I think if it became "more of a thing" in Champaign, we'd fill it up ... but it'll take more than one good year. IF you accept this argument as an insurmountable obstacle to Illinois ever getting a good crowd for the last game of the season, even when we are good, then I don't see how you can argue for any other solution other than making the investment right now in making Illinois/Northwestern an annual holiday tradition in Chicago, regardless of who the home team is. That not only shifts the game to a market with tens of thousands of our alumni/fans (and a majority of our current students), it shifts some of the ticket burden to Northwestern's side, as well. Honestly, it's never going to be Georgia/Florida or Texas/Oklahoma, but I would 100% support this.