if I had to guess… I would say BroMart is not a factor in ANY decision made for the 2025 roster… and certainly not affecting the long-term strategy that would be considered when 1st round picks are made. He is a bust. They are almost certainly moving on…
but that actually helps explain WHY more investment would be considered so important. They clearly value the interior DL…
and don’t seem willing to stop spending resources even if EVERY move doesn’t turn to gold.
Lopez is on a modest 1 year deal.
If Alim wasn’t hurt… would he even be a Lion?
No 1st round draft picks are determined by the signing of a 1-year deal for $3.6 million.
Reader…. is entering his final year of his deal.
Certainly a key player for 2025…. but likely not coming back in 2026 under ideal circumstances.
.
So…. you named 3 players…. and significant investment was made to get them……
but those 3 players are NOT the future in Detroit beyond this season.
That is what the draft is all about for this team under this regime.
This year I think you will have Reader and Lopez rotating the NT and Levi and Williams rotating the 3t at least till Aliam gets back , they won’t have to rush him.
Exactly. The Williams pick made of ton of sense for the future. We are pretty thin at DT after the 2025 season. Levi, Reader, Lopez, Paschal all free agents next offseason.
Very very good and fair points. I have a very different view of the NT position. Really really good run stuffers, if that is all they are, are both cheap and plentiful. All the other positions on the Dline are neither. So I would have Benito Jones’d the ONE backup NT position, kept Alim a very very good NT with movement and at a very fair investment value and rolled with say a first round investment in Calijah Kancy an upfield penetrating 3t as opposed to a MLB in Cap’n Jack (another move with a first round pick to shore up the A and B gaps).
Then take AAAAALLLL that FA money and get a guy who puts QB’s in the dirt. Then that’s a Dline of say… Hutch/Kancy/Alim/Hunter (FA). Take my guy Ivan Pace in the 7th round and roll with him and Rodrigo. So I get where you are coming from based on how BH (cough over) values the NT position. I just don’t agree with high investment NT’s. Didn’t understand it when we spent boatload on an over the hill Ngata and don’t understand dropping a first round pick on one this draft. Now, to be fair, I do think our guy has the potential to be more dangerous than Benito Jones right. But that’s where I’m at. Being able to stuff the run but not put QB’s in the dirt, is what saw us with a one and done in the playoffs. IMHO of course.
He is undoubtedly a great attacker, but he’s just such a liability against the run. Literally ranked dead-last in run defense grade for DL with more than 300 snaps his rookie season and in the bottom third last year (with a terrible performance in their playoff loss to Washington). PFF grade isn’t the be-all end-all, but it gives a decent idea of a player’s strengths and weaknesses. Kancey does rack up TFLs (which you’d expect given his penetrating style), but he’s almost unplayable at the point of attack. Given the importance we put on defending the run, he was really never an option for us.
I can’t help but detect Holmes using the word “convicted” multiple times. I think the word he wants is “convinced.” Unless we’re changing the team philosophy, in which case two thumbs up!
They’re just coming back together, since they emerged from the same place: the latin root “convincere” which means “conquer with.” (vincere = conquer, which is where we get ‘invincible’).
Convince quickly came to mean “conquer with arguing,” because it was an era of much consternation, then some genius took the conjugated form - convictus - and decided it should mean “the result of having been conquered with arguing,” which they used to burn witches and other sinners back in the day.
Conviction wouldn’t come to mean “belief” until a couple hundred years later, when instead of conquering with arguing like their overly litigious ancestors, people started to conquer more and more of life’s daily struggles with faith.
You can, but he’s the best run defender in the league. Force multiplier. That’s an outlier situation that made sense for them (until it didn’t, in the playoff game against the Commies). But that’s not how we’re built. We like to attack, but you have to be able to play the run on the way.
Oh I didn’t really want him as a Lion. Alim was my 3 tech. But I can see how that works for the Bucs. Of note…our dline coach was with the Bucs for a long time.
And that playoff game vs the Redskins… They gave up only 82 yards rushing on 33 carries. Below 3 yards per cary is pretty darn good.
I’d say the future DT position looks like this for 2026
Tyleik… Lopez?…. Bromart
Alim…. Wingo …. Paschal
Reader last year here will be used (better player too) like we used Brockers to mentor Tyleik. Reader will be a productive player in rotation this year as well as Tyleik.
Levi we thought was gone this year, gotta a gift to get him back so cheap for 1 year
Yeah, sorry, should have been clearer about that. They ran it over Kancey on three separate must-have conversions. Overall they were still good - Vea and all.
Seriously that was my biggest surprise of the offseason. Holmes sounded shocked we got him back. He was talking about doing back flips in excitement. Holmes thought Levi was getting a serious bag. I guess teams were still a little nervous about his back injury. Works for us.
I was very surprised, as was Levi, his agent and Holmes.
Holmes threw a low ball offer because he knew he wouldn’t be able to match Levi’s true value.
But no other teams wanted to give big money or a long term contract to a 3T with a fused lumbar spine.
It works out very well for Holmes and the Lions.
Levi will be extremely motivated to show he is healthy and what he can do on the field.
He has to stay healthy and produce this season or he will probably never get the Big Bag.
He was just “my guy” there are plenty of other 3t types we could have invested in after Levi was drafted. I do like Wingo, but the Paschal 3t dream BH came up with isn’t happening. I think Kancy “here” sandwiched between Alim and Hutch and they could run some run defense cover for him. It’s again usually which way you want to lean. There are a handful of guys who can do both very well. A handful. Outside of that, you have to lean and yes, it’s completely obvious which way BH leans and unfortunately it comes at the expense of giving QB’s all day and against elite teams they’ll beat us if we can’t put up 40. We had SF beat at halftime. A pass rush would have put us in the SB. Great run defense didn’t. Daniels ran into one (3 sacks for -27 yards) after playing us (0 sacks) and that was that. But hey let’s run it back with Marcus Davenport and draft another 335 DT to relieve our 9M FA NT… #doubledown!
I agree with most of what you said, but this part to me is still very much up in the air. We were one of the highest pressure rate teams in the league last year before our injuries killed us, so I still have rather high hopes that getting after the QB can be a strength. In fact to me the main issue wasn’t pressure, it was that we were coming in too hot. It was maddening how many almost sacks we had early in the year, though I did think we’d gone a long way toward shoring that up by that ill-fated Dallas game.
Then the injuries hit and it was more of the same ol’ frustrations, QBs just sitting around and picking us apart.
