Their favorite team has never played in a Super Bowl, but members of the DFW Detroit Lions Fan Club might be as passionate about football as any sports group in Texas.
The fan club, which was formed officially in 2018, has added a second location this season for its weekly watch parties, gathering at Speeds Billiards, 700 N. Watson Road.
The committed faithful, many of whom are transplants to North Texas from Michigan, fill the sports bar with the Lions’ unique Honolulu blue and silver color combination, and boisterous cheers when Detroit makes a good play.
The group has been growing since 2017, and now contains more than 500 members, according to Jay Finlinson, a Plano resident who was at the forefront of the weekly gatherings.
“Chuck Gross and James Adams are card-carrying members No. 1 and 2,” Finlinson said of his friends with whom he used to meet on game days at Stadium Café in Addison.
“There were probably seven or eight of us that met every week,” said Finlinson who lived in the Detroit suburbs of Royal Oak and Sterling Heights before relocating to Texas in 1981. “We decided at the end of the 2017 season that we can grow this thing.”
The group began a Facebook page and wore Lions gear around DFW, attracting more attention and followers. They moved the gatherings to Fox & Hound in Richardson, but Lions fans on the west side of DFW – some of whom are transplanted auto workers employed at Arlington’s GM plant – wanted someplace closer to home.
So Michele Schlosser, a native of Mount Clemens, Michigan who now lives in Arlington, stepped up to get the club a location in America’s Dream City. 
During the Lions’ first game of the season, and the first official gathering at Speeds, more than 100 fans turned out, wearing team jerseys bearing the names and numbers of Detroit stars from the present and past. Among them were Aidan Hutchinson’s No. 97 and Jared Goff’s No. 16 as well as legendary Hall of Famer Barry Sanders’ No. 20.
The gatherings go beyond football, and beyond Texas. Each week, a 50-50 raffle provides a donation to the Lions Club International, and at halftime, attendees can pay for chances to toss a mini football through a tire, with the weekly winners facing off at the end of the season to see who claims the trophy.
At the Arlington location, fans occasionally get a taste of home when caterer D-Town Coney Island sets up in the parking lot, serving Detroit- and Flint-style coney island hot dogs, Polish sausages, Michigan favorite Faygo soda (called “pop” up north) and Detroit-born Better Made potato chips.
The NFL Lions have taken notice, too, Finlinson said. When the NFL draft was held in Arlington in 2018, the team provided tickets for 50 members of the fan club to attend. The club also regularly sends gear and items to be auctioned for charity, and when Detroit travels to play the Cowboys, team representatives show up at the fan club tailgate in the AT&T Stadium parking lot with TV crews and Little Caesars pizza, another Detroit-born delicacy.
For Schlosser, the meetings are about camaraderie and a taste of home – or welcoming Texans into a boisterous fold.
Among the Texans drawn into the club is Sascha Martinez of Arlington, who grew up in a Cowboys-loving household but was invited to watch games by his friend Aaron Feldt, also of Arlington.
Martinez is drawn to the Lions because “they’ve been the underdog a lot.” He said he also likes the bright blue and silver in the uniforms and owns several Lions jerseys.
Feldt had been looking for a group to connect with since moving from Michigan to Arlington in 2010.
“I ran into a guy in Walmart wearing a Lions jersey, and he told me about this club,” Feldt said.
Schlosser, whose “sports-nut” father fostered her passion for games, says the fan club captures the spirit of Detroit sports fans. “It’s Detroit, and Detroit is all about their teams, win, lose, or draw.”
