It has been 32 years since the Detroit Lions last went to the NFC championship game back in 1992. The team has won twelve games so far this season, losing just five. People are starting to believe the Honolulu blue and silver team have a chance to upset the Forty-Niners to take the team’s first conference championship since 1957. Michiganders are getting excited, and for good reason. According to reporting by the Detroit Free Press, even General Motors understands the excitement and will delay the start of third shift at Flint Assembly on Sunday evening to allow workers to watch the game.
This Sunday marks just the second time in the team’s 93-year history that it has made the championship game. The Barry Sanders-led Lions lost that 1992 game in dramatic fashion. Being a Lions fan and being let down by the team every year kind of explains a bit of what it’s like to live in Michigan. Everything is a little bit terrible all the time, but you still have a sense of pride for the mitten state. There are no fair-weather Lions fans, because the Lions never have fair weather. They’re terrible, you know they’re terrible, but when they aren’t terrible, you earned your fanaticism by sticking with them for decades.
The Flint plant is the only GM factory in Michigan running a third shift on Sunday. This plant churns out the company’s popular Chevrolet Silverado and GMC Sierra pickup trucks, which explains the need to keep the assembly line flowing even on a Sunday. The factory has about 1,500 people working third shift, which typically runs from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. the following morning. Because the Lions/Niners game starts at 6:30, the factory will shut down from 10 to 11 p.m. and shorten the shift by an hour. Workers will be shorted an hour of pay for the closure, but according the the UAW shop chairman, “nobody is complaining.”
Stellantis, which operates three plants in the Detroit area with night shifts this Sunday, “will run normal production schedules.” The Lions have been owned by the Ford family dating back to 1963 when William Clay Ford purchased the team, though Ford has similarly not committed to letting workers stay home to watch the game.
If the game goes into overtime and runs past 11 p.m., it seems likely that managers at Flint Assembly can expect to get more than a few calls about workers having “car troubles” on their way in.