Detroit Lions general manager Brad Holmes spoke for over 40 minutes on Thursday to recap the 2025 season and look ahead to the 2026 offseason. Here are the biggest takeaways from the press conference.<\/p>\n
Note: I am not including Holmes\u2019 comments on David Montgomery. Those were covered in a separate piece here<\/a>. <\/p>\n Brad Holmes admits to mistakes\u2026 but doesn\u2019t specify which ones<\/p>\n Many fans were hoping Brad Holmes would take some culpability for the team\u2019s failures in 2025 after he had taken a rather confident attitude in previous years. The Lions general manager did\u2026 sort of. He said unequivocally that this year was a disappointment, failure, and\u2014like Dan Campbell\u2014gave himself an F for the year, because \u201cit was either good enough or not good enough, and it\u2019s not good enough.\u201d<\/p>\n Holmes said when failure happens, he looks to himself first, and even admitted there were things he\u2019s already identified as mistakes he\u2019s made.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m always going to look inward. Early stages, but already started to identify some things that I can definitely do better,\u201d Holmes said.<\/p>\n However, Holmes declined to specify what mistakes he\u2019s made, and he pretty much rebuffed any suggestions made by the media.<\/p>\n [Note: questions here are paraphrased. Answers are direct quotes.]<\/p>\n Would you have changed anything about how you responded to Frank Ragnow\u2019s retirement? <\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI think we did the best we could with everything that we were trying to do from a roster standpoint.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Did you do enough at offensive line? <\/strong><\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think that we\u2019ve ever gone into an offseason with a question mark or a hole that we didn\u2019t attack that position with urgency. But sometimes it just doesn\u2019t work out as well as we hoped.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n \u201cWe just couldn\u2019t — It just didn\u2019t come together like how we would have liked it to be, from a draft standpoint.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n Holmes will keep on drafting developmental players if they fit<\/p>\n Some, myself very much included, have wondered if Holmes has taken on unnecessary risks in the draft by drafting highly-developmental prospects like Hendon Hooker, Brodric Martin, Colby Sorsdal, Giovanni Manu, and even Isaac TeSlaa. Despite some misses within those picks, Holmes doesn\u2019t appear to be swayed from that strategy if the player still fits their character and talent requirements.<\/p>\n \u201cAs long as they\u2019re made up of the right kind of stuff, that\u2019s really — I think that\u2019s the main thing that matters,\u201d Holmes said. \u201cYeah, there\u2019s a baseline of talent that you have to have for this league, but they have to have the right temperament, the right intangible qualities, they have to have the right football character.\u201d<\/p>\n He doesn\u2019t believe he\u2019s not aggressive<\/p>\n At two different points in his press conference, Holmes was asked if he intends on being more aggressive or urgent with the team after what is being perceived as a lack of splashy free agency or trade deadline moves this past year. Holmes essentially pushed back on any complacency criticisms, saying that there are a lot of moves the team tried to make last season, but the deal just never came together.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think that we\u2019ve like not tried to be aggressive, or just being aggressive just to say we\u2019re being aggressive,\u201d Holmes said. \u201cUsually, when those kinds of moves happen, usually there is a deficiency that\u2019s clear and that team needs to act on that. When we\u2019ve had deficiencies, we\u2019ve tried to act on things. Some of them just didn\u2019t come together, but we didn\u2019t want to settle or reach.<\/p>\n He also warned that they may make some moves this offseason that aren\u2019t the headline-making type.<\/p>\n \u201cHonestly, a lot of the things that we\u2019ll look at, and a lot of the changes and tweaks and adjustments that we will make probably won\u2019t come with a headline,\u201d Holmes said. \u201cThat\u2019s not to say that we won\u2019t do something that\u2019s in that \u2018splash\u2019 category, but it\u2019s not indicative of a lack of effort, work ethic.\u201d<\/p>\n The Detroit Lions are in the market for a center<\/p>\n With the unclear future of Graham Glasgow, the Lions will have to figure out their center position, as they continue to search for answers after Frank Ragnow\u2019s retirement in 2025.<\/p>\n Second-round pick Tate Ratledge began training camp at center before the team quickly moved him to guard, where he stayed all season. Holmes admitted that moving Ratledge back to center is still on the table, and he was encouraged by what he saw during OTAs and training camp.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s done it before, he did it in OTAs, didn\u2019t think that he was a fish out of water,\u201d Holmes said. \u201cAnd then all of the reps that he\u2019s logged this year, just all the rookie snaps, he may have played the most snaps of any rookie on this year. So whether he continues that guard or center, but we know that he\u2019s an option.\u201d<\/p>\n But, more importantly, Holmes said that it is a position they will look to add this offseason.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re definitely going to have to continue to look for one, whether it be the free agency, the draft, or a trade.\u201d<\/p>\n What the Lions are looking for in their next OC<\/p>\n The Lions\u2019 offensive coordinator search is underway, and there are already two candidates on the board: former Dolphins head coach Mike McDaniel<\/a> and Commanders QB coach David Blough<\/a>.<\/p>\n Holmes offered his ideas on what the team is looking for in their next offensive coordinator, mentioning that they will consider both coaches with and without play-calling experience and look both inside and out of the organization. What they will prioritize more than anything else, it sounds like, is fitting within the team.<\/p>\n \u201cThere has to be leadership, there has to be detail-oriented, he\u2019s gotta be able to (have) command over the room,\u201d Holmes said. \u201cYou just have to be able to know that there\u2019s somebody that\u2019s gonna be able to dot every \u2018I\u2019 and cross every \u2018T,\u2019 and make sure that nothing is compromised from the detail standpoint, from the standard standpoint, from the start of the game-planning period all the way to the end of the week.\u201d<\/p>\n The Lions don\u2019t need \u201cdeep surgery\u201d<\/p>\n Unsurprisingly, when asked how far off the Lions were from Super Bowl contention, Holmes said, \u201cI don\u2019t think that we\u2019re that far off.\u201d But he also noted that they need to make sure they don\u2019t veer too far off course just because they think they\u2019re close to contention.<\/p>\n \u201cMaybe that is one of the items that needs to be looked back on, is thinking that you are so close and so now you start changing some things because you only need this piece, you only need that piece,\u201d Holmes said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s like, \u2018Naw, uh-uh.\u2019 Like, who\u2019s the best player to fit for what we\u2019re trying to do that has gotten us to have the expectations that we have as a football team right now?\u201d<\/p>\n Ultimately, he concluded:<\/p>\n \u201cI do not think that this is a deep surgery, overhaul. I don\u2019t think that. But obviously, there needs to be some adjustments made for sure.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Detroit Lions general manager Brad Holmes spoke for over 40 minutes on Thursday to recap the 2025 season…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":503857,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39],"tags":[16242,27705,27706,1232,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-503856","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-nfl","8":"tag-detroit-lions-analysis","9":"tag-detroit-lions-news","10":"tag-detroit-lions-quotes","11":"tag-nfl","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-united-states","14":"tag-unitedstates","15":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115865483591762701","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503856","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=503856"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/503856\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/503857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=503856"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=503856"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=503856"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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