A modern-day gold rush? Detroit Lions fans are trying to make it so.
There’s a Gold Rush going on again. This time, though, it ain’t about the money.
It’s about history. Or at least the chance to see it up close — the sheer potential of an NFC championship is driving thousands of Detroiters and Michiganders to figure out a way to go west this weekend.
Sound familiar? It should. Detroit Lions fans have been taking over NFL stadiums all fall. Still, the thought of a sea of Honolulu Blue at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, California, this Sunday for the NFC title game is hard to fathom.
There’s no way Detroit can take over the home of the San Francisco 49ers, right?
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This is the NFC title game. The winner gets the Super Bowl. Hard to imagine 49ers fans selling their tickets to Lions fans. They aren’t Jaguars fans.
And yet?
They’re fans existing in a capitalist system, not to mention people who might like making money on the secondhand-ticket market. Hard to blame them.
Buying after-market tickets is as old as sporting events, and as old as tickets. Supply and demand, right? Well, the demand has never been higher.
As for the supply? It’s limited to fans — or companies — willing to sell off their seats.
For a regular season game in, say, a bandwagon-fan market like Tampa, Florida, the number of the willing is huge: Some 20,000 Lions fans took over Raymond James Stadium back in October. For a game at AT&T Stadium in Texas? The home of the Cowboys? The willing weren’t so much.
But then that was the eve of New Year's Eve, and Lions fans can be forgiven for not showing up in the way they had all season. The same was true a week earlier in Minneapolis, when Vikings fans kept their tickets for a game on Christmas Eve.
Again, Lions fans deserve a pass for those two.
Still, Lions fans have taken over some staunch fanbases' home turf this season — epic locales such as Kansas City, Green Bay and New Orleans.
That first one came on an opening-night Thursday, with a ring ceremony scheduled to celebrate the Chiefs' Super Bowl 57 victory. Patrick Mahomes is the quarterback. Travis Kelce is the tight end. Still, Lions fans numbered close to 10,000.
They chanted so loudly during the second half, viewers could hear them through their televisions. Network announcers were stunned at the noise made by road team fans in one of the loudest, frothiest home environments in the league.
Could it be a similar scene Sunday afternoon in the Bay Area?
It would certainly be the farthest takeover of the season — roughly 2,400 miles separate San Francisco and Detroit, along with a lot of mountains and desert. It would be the most expensive, too.
That hasn’t stopped fans from buying up every airline ticket between here and there the past few days. In fact, Delta added an extra flight and brought in a few larger planes to satiate the demand.
At least part of it.
Because Delta doesn’t have enough planes — nor the FAA enough airspace — to reroute the number of folks here trying to head west. A couple of ticket services show 14-20% of sales for the NFC title game are from Michigan, though it’s hard to know what percentage of total sales those resales represent.
Stubhub reported that NFC ticket sales outnumber AFC ticket sales on its site by nearly 90%, which tells us how hot the after-market is for the 49ers-Lions matchup — and also tells us that a lot of Lions fans are trying mighty hard to make a difference at Levi’s Stadium.
Or just trying hard to show up for history.
If the Lions win, they’ll go to the Super Bowl. You know this. You also know the Lions have never been to the Super Bowl. You may not have known that this surge of Lions love isn’t just driving ticket sales and airfare costs and airline decisions and hotel costs, but ratings.
Not to mention goodwill.
It’s why I’ve heard story after story this week of fans plotting how to go west. From driving to Toronto, or Chicago, or Cleveland, and then flying to San Francisco, or flying from Detroit to anywhere near San Francisco.
And by anywhere, I mean Los Angeles (a 7-hour drive); Portland (10 hours from Northern Oregon), Salt Lake City (11 hours) or Las Vegas (9 hours). Some have even talked about renting an RV and road tripping it. Not from here, necessarily, but from anywhere reasonably out west.
The push from Michigan to California has happened before; ex-pats are all over the Golden state. That took decades, though. This is happening in less than a week.
As Lions offensive coordinator Ben Johnson said Thursday, the whole city has been waiting for something like this.
“And you’ve seen it all year long,” he said, “(as) most of our away games have been home games to a degree.”
Johnson and so many players have said they’ve never seen anything like it. Pent-up love will do that. It’ll move people to move in ways they haven’t before, in numbers they haven’t before.
And whether Lions fans take over 20% or 14% or even 8%, you can bet they’ll be seen Sunday afternoon in northern California, their Honolulu Blue popping against the red seats in Santa Clara.
They’ll be heard, too. They’ll have traveled too far to be silent.
Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.
Next up: 49ers
Matchup: Detroit Lions (14-5) at San Francisco (13-5), NFC championship game.
Kickoff: 6:30 p.m. Sunday; Levi's Stadium, Santa Clara, California.
TV/radio: Fox; WXYT-FM (97.1).
At stake: Sunday's winner will advance to Super Bowl 58 in Las Vegas, where they'll face the winner of Sunday's AFC title game between the Baltimore Ravens and the Kansas City Chiefs.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Lions fans flood west in hopes of seeing history in California
