Thanks to this frantic Detroit Lions offseason, it almost feels like Brad Holmes has been GM for longer than he has been. He’s only been in the captain’s chair for a little over four months, though, during which he’s had to orchestrate a trade of Matthew Stafford, make a top-10 draft pick and (attempt to) bring the Lions out from the salary-cap and schematic nightmares of the previous regime.
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“After you get the job, and now it’s up to you and your coach to actually fix it and upgrade it and take action, that’s when it kind of hits you a little bit differently,” Holmes recently told The Athletic. “I was prepared as possible but didn’t really know that, third week on the job, we’d be making this trade for a franchise quarterback and all. Those are the things that you just really are not prepared for.”
Already, the Lions’ roster has taken on an image of what Holmes and new head coach Dan Campbell want it to be. It’s also nowhere even close to — not even in sight of — the finish line.
On the first installment of “The Athletic Football Show’s” offseason interview series, Holmes spoke with podcast host Robert Mays about everything from his initial impression of the Lions’ roster to a productive draft weekend. The full interview can be heard here:
Below, we’ve highlighted a few noteworthy sections from Holmes’ visit: First, the back and forth between Holmes and Mays, then reactions from Lions beat writer Chris Burke. How has Holmes fared in his roster building, to this point? And what comes next?
(The transcript has been edited for length. Mays’ questions are in bold, followed by Holmes’ answers.)
So when you’re looking at certain aspects of the roster, were there priorities — just position group-wise, offense, defense? How did you kind of stack up the hierarchy of your to-do list when you took over?
Yeah, well, let’s just be honest, we had a lot of areas of work we had to do. I’ve been hearing a lot about, like, the draft and everybody’s saying, “Were you meaning to go all defensive linemen?” And it was, like, no, we could have went all skill. But I will say, Dan and I sat down and we identified what the strengths were on the roster and what the depth was and who had upside and where we need to upgrade.
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So, it was a good starting point that we did that. Like, let’s say the offensive line was more of a strength on the roster. Then it’s, OK, well, how do we add the depth behind the offensive line? And what is it like to upgrade at this spot? But now you look at the other side of the ball and the defensive line and say, OK, how do we upgrade here? Well, we have these guys leaving, this guy leaving. How do we get better?
And we feel like we’ve done everything that we set out to do so far, but we’ve still got a lot of work to do.
Outside of the offensive line, would you say pretty much every other position group was almost a blank slate?
Let’s say this: There was a lot of unknowns on the roster. So, you could say that there was a little bit of a blank slate. We were upfront with all the players that we acquire that it is open competition, and we’re not coming in here anchored to say, “OK, well, this guy made this much money, and he’s on this kind of contract so he’s going to be the starter.” Look, if we acquire (someone via) free agency, if we draft a guy, if we trade for a guy, then we’re upfront, it’s open competition, because it is a brand-new regime.
But we did identify where there was depth, where you saw upside for backups. But it’s a whole different scheme, it’s a whole different regime, and (we had) guys that you just hadn’t seen on film that much.
Beat writer take: No lies detected here — this roster was a mess, financially and in terms of transitioning out of Matt Patricia’s system. As we mentioned frequently headed into the draft, that was both an exciting and challenging variable when trying to figure out what Holmes might do. As he said, the Lions just as easily could have doubled up on receivers (or linebackers or safeties) and no one would have batted an eye.
The Alim McNeill pick was a surprise on the heels of the Levi Onwuzurike selection, but does anyone really question the need? The Lions needed to get deeper and more disruptive along their defensive line. Sticking to their board allowed them to do that.
With Jared (Goff), I’m so interested in how you think he fits what you’re trying to do. Why did you want to commit to a quarterback even on a two-year basis, rather than saying, “We’re going to trade Matthew somewhere, just get picks and try to stopgap that position until we find our guy of the future”?
Well, that was the intriguing part of the trade. Yeah, obviously the draft capital is great, but to be able to also get Jared — the record that he’s done, I think his resume speaks for itself in terms of the amount of wins that he’s had in the past four years is among the top in all the league. So that’s what you’ve got to be excited about.
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You hear a lot of the outside noise, which you try to just block out. But the last time I saw him, he was starting a divisional playoff game on the road and completing over 70 percent of his passes and doing that with a broken hand. The one thing that I have always known about Jared is his toughness — his physical and mental toughness. That’s always stood out to me ever since he was a rookie, when he got thrown in with the Rams. It wasn’t a great situation from an offensive line standpoint, and he took a beating, but he kept getting up. So I knew that Dan’s vision of having a team that has grit and toughness, I knew Jared would fit that.
I’m thinking about Michael Brockers, too, where you’re going out and getting a stabilizing veteran presence. How do you try to thread that needle between, “We don’t want to commit ourselves to a certain version of the roster, but we also need stabilizing veteran presences on both sides of the ball,” because that’s a delicate balance, it seems like.
It actually made the job a little bit more fun from a roster-building standpoint, because you did have to balance that. But that was the uniqueness, I say specifically this year, this offseason, especially the heat of free agency with so many one-year deals signed.
And that’s the one thing Dan and I said we’ll do: Look, we’re not going to just bridge guys, so we can have just a body there just to kind of hold down the fort as we build. We signed all guys that we were excited about and guys that we’d like. So even with the trade with Stafford, to get Jared Goff, and then the trade (for) Brockers — we’re excited about that. We’re excited to to add Jamaal Williams, Tyrell Williams, Breshad Perriman. A Quinton Dunbar. We were excited to add those players.
And even if they were shorter deals, I think it’s a perfect kind of let’s call it a marriage — a perfect marriage — because we all have something to prove.
Beat writer take: Holmes and the Lions’ coaches keep ticking off the same boxes when they talk about Goff — toughness, experience, past success, etc. What they’ve yet to do, probably by design, is get into reasons why he could be a long-term answer at quarterback. It’s far, far too early to commit to him on that level, and there isn’t any imminent plan to do so. Acquiring him prevented the Lions from having to scramble for a Stafford replacement, during another uncertain offseason, while they were overhauling the entire organization.
But what Holmes said on the second question here — that the Lions are genuinely excited about their recent acquisitions — is true. They’ve brought in a nice mix of known-quantity players (Goff, Brockers, Jamaal Williams) and high-upside, low-risk options (Tyrell Williams, Perriman, Dunbar, Alex Anzalone). Odds are that all of those additions won’t work out or stay healthy for the entire season, but some good fortune with those pickups is the straightest line toward surprising people in 2021.
A lot of the guys who signed got short-term deals. The one exception is Romeo Okwara. When you’re trying to figure out if this is the type of guy we want as a long-term building block and you’re committing resources to him at this stage of your trajectory, what is that process like?
It wasn’t difficult to actually make the decision that we wanted to re-sign Romeo, it was just about how we’re going to make it work. Because, obviously, he plays a premium position — a pass rush is always premium. And at what his age was, the productive year that he was coming off of, his size, his length, that doesn’t come cheap. And then, you always talk about the intangibles — he plays hard, he plays the game the right ways, tough and smart, all of that. When personnel and coaching staff collaborated, he always kind of rose to the top in terms of a premium priority.
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You have to make some difficult decisions. Can you afford to franchise a (Kenny) Golladay and re-sign (Okwara)? I mean, those are the decisions you have to (make). We’re extremely excited and happy that Romeo was able to get re-signed. We’ve got big plans for him going forward.
Beat writer take: Compare Holmes’ assessment of Okwara here to that of Goff earlier. Completely different. They’ve already decided — as the massive contract indicates — that Okwara will be a building block well beyond ’21.
The Golladay-Okwara mention by Holmes is interesting. Were the Lions actually at a fork in the road where they either franchised Golladay or signed Okwara (but not both or neither)? In terms of the cap implications, it always sort of looked that way, but we haven’t heard the GM lay it out in such a manner. On the surface, based on where they’re at as a franchise, the Lions made the better choice by securing a rising pass rusher for several seasons rather than hanging on to a very talented receiver for one. But the verdict could shift some if Golladay reaches All-Pro levels and Okwara fails to live up to the money.
Let’s talk about Penei Sewell. How much knowledge of him did you have before this offseason? Because in LA, you guys haven’t had a first-round pick in 25 years, so you probably weren’t ever going to think that you were going to be in play for him. So, how much did you know about him?
I first heard about Penei back during the 2019 season. Oregon had another offensive lineman that came out in that draft and he wasn’t eligible yet, and so everyone was like, “the left tackle, the left tackle, the left tackle.”
So you kinda peeked and it’s like, “Oh wow, he looks good.” And then the opt out happens. So then during the opt out — credit the West Coast area scout with the Rams, Vito Ganella. When I was in the college director role, Vito would just rave about this guy. He’s like, “Brad, I’m telling you, this guy.” When you have a scout that’s that excited about one of the players in his area, you immediately take notice. When I first looked, I was like, “Wow, I haven’t seen this in a long time.”
You very rarely see guys that not only are that explosive, but just that nimble and have the balance and everything else. And I understand why you’d get entranced by that. There’s a lot to love. I’m curious, what were the question marks? What were the things where you’re like, “I don’t know about that”?
That’s a great question. Because every time you see a player that talented, you immediately go to: What am I missing here? Especially when it comes to offensive linemen, because that, to me, that is such an instinctive position that you just have to have a sense of awareness and positioning. What (Rams GM) Les (Snead) would say often is that you have to understand geometry.
That’s the one thing that Penei, as physically gifted as he was — and then when you find out he was the youngest guy in the draft coming out, that’s when you got even more intrigued, because there are areas of his game that he still needs to work on. But when you find out his intangibles, and his character and his desire to be great, and him coming from a football family, and his dad being a coach and how coachable he is, and then you kind of put all those different attributes together, it’s like, “OK, all right. I think we’re cooking with gas here.”
Because he can get so much better. He’s so young. And it’s not like he has a ton of things that he needs to work on. But he is young, and he’s a rookie, and he hadn’t played a ton in college football. So you added all that up, and then we felt good about his upside, which we thought was monstrous.
Was there part of you that looked at the offensive line being a strength and thought, “Maybe we go a different direction here, because we already have building blocks in this area”?
I’ll take you back to my time with the Rams. We drafted Chris Long, and then we drafted Robert Quinn, in 2011. And then, the new regime comes in, and then we draft Michael Brockers, in 2012. Defensive line was always a strength, and we just kept adding and adding to make it become just a monster and a beast. There was a need to add more at wide receiver, there was a need to add more at other positions. But when we got to know more about Penei and said, “Hey, look, if we can add this guy to our offensive line, how much more of a strength does that create? And with that strength or that monster created, then how much does that impact everything else? How much does that help Jared? How much does that help (D’Andre) Swift?”
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That’s kind of when it became a little bit more easier for us to come to, I guess, an agreement to add a guy like Penei.
Above all else, in your first draft, with the seventh overall pick, you just need to hit on a guy. And to have it be, just coincidentally, at a spot where you already feel good about everything else, I’m sure there’s peace of mind that comes along with the knowledge that you might have just finished off the offensive line for 2021.
Funny you say that. So, it was probably about a week before the draft. We were kind of going through some scenarios, and we brought up Penei. And our senior personnel executive, John Dorsey, with all the experience that he had as a GM and putting together successful rosters, I said (to him), like, “Man, Penei would just be awesome to land.” I’ll never forget, Dorsey goes, “Well, it helps you sleep better at night.”
And when he said it, it just really hit me. I was like, you’re right, it does help you sleep better. When you add that, it just affects so many other things.
Beat writer take: When Campbell spoke with The Athletic shortly after his hire, he all but promised that the Lions would lean into a best-player-available approach at the draft. “If this guy’s a fit,” Campbell said, “if he’s the best guy and we love him but we’re stacked at the position, we probably ought to still get him.”
Campbell added that he’d rather have an abundance of high-quality players at one spot — and maybe have to trade one to solve the issue — than to make decisions just to fill out the depth chart: “I don’t want to get caught in, well, we don’t have one of these.”
You can see the impact of Holmes’ time with the Rams on his roster-building strategy. LA’s elite defensive line elevated the rest of the team, and the Lions would like the same to happen with their O-line. If they can dictate tempo behind Sewell, Frank Ragnow, Taylor Decker and their backs, it would take pressure off Goff and the defense.
I saw the video: Did you call Atlanta and see what it would have taken to get up there, because you were a little bit worried about Penei not being there at seven? Was that part of the thought process, as well?
Well, yeah, we did. We did have dialogue with Atlanta on that pick, and I’ll just leave it at that. But yeah, we did, we did have dialogue there. And they just decided to stay tight, and they could have had the same train of thought, just like we did — that they had their player in mind. I totally understand that. You just kind of want to just make sure that you’re not anchored, and you have all options available. You just can’t be scared to make those moves, if you can make ‘em.
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Let me play devil’s advocate, then. Because of where you guys are at, wouldn’t you say that that would be a strong argument against trading up, because you want to give yourself as many cost-controlled, draft-pick resources as possible here, as you work on rebuilding the roster?
You could say that, but I will take it back to knowing the strength of each draft. Every draft is different — the 2011 draft and the, let’s say, 2014 draft, like what that was at the top, that’s a lot of firepower. But maybe the 2013 draft and the 2019 draft wasn’t as top-heavy as there, so that’s the part that you have to weigh. That plays a lot into that. So it goes back to, yeah, you could trade back and have more bats at the plate and have more cost and control. But how much impact are you adding versus being in position — or let’s say striking distance — to trade up and get a player?
Beat writer take: A revealing portion of Holmes’ interview, especially if we read between the lines. The 2021 draft class absolutely offered enticing depth at a few spots — the Lions pounced on two of those, receiver and linebacker, in Round 4. But Detroit had a handful of elite prospects it preferred above everyone else, hence the interest in moving up.
On top of that, scouting the ’22 draft could be easier, both for the league as a whole as COVID-19 precautions relax and for the Lions, specifically, after Holmes has time to put his full system in place. So, it would make sense that Detroit would target its favorites this year and cast a wider net headed into next year.
(Top photo: Courtesy of the Detroit Lions)