Ok, I know I just did a Detroit Lions mock draft a couple weeks ago at the Senior Bowl. The plan was to wait until after the combine to do the next one, but with all the talk from Brad Holmes about trading out of the first round (He teased it twice last week) I had to do a mock that featured the Lions doing just that.
I used the Pro Football Focus mock draft simulator and after striking out on some trades, I found a trade partner in the Carolina Panthers. A team that doesn't currently have a first round pick. Here's the deal we agreed upon:
- Lions get: 33rd pick and 101st pick
- Panthers get: 29th pick and the 2025 fourth-round pick that the Lions got from the Eagles in the D'Andre Swift trade
One more thing. Before we get into the draft, here's what the first round looked like when the Lions traded out.
Here's the mock:
This is a steal for the Lions at the top of the second round. Robinson is a guy that is working his way up the board and the word in Alabama after a really great Senior Bowl week was that Robinson is someone that could be moving into the first round. When I say good week I mean a really good week. Robinson was voted as the overall practice player of the week by coaches and players in Alabama. It's probably because of stuff like this.
Robinson finished the 2023 season with 8.5 sacks and 14 tackles for a loss. A pretty solid year.
I took Sweat with the 29th pick in my Senior Bowl mock draft after hearing similar things that I heard about Robinson. That and new Lions defensive line coach Terrell Williams had a chance to work with him all week and the word was that he raved about him.
I did a full writeup on Sweat here, but I have to put this video in here again to show what kind of power he has.
If the Lions can walk out of the second round with their defensive line adding two pieces like this, they can go open a bottle of champagne later that night.
The Lions could use some help at corner and everyone knows it. You can see from the first round picture we posted above that a lot of teams need corners right now. There were seven taken there. The good news is that this draft is pretty deep at corner. The bad news is that the Lions aren't going to get the one's you want the most if they trade out. They don't really have the best shot if they don't trade out.
Brownlee is no joke though. He's another guy that had a tremendous week in Alabama and even walked out of the game itself with the interception shown in the picture.
Brownlee fits the Lions well because he's good in coverage but he can also be a good run stopper. Something the Lions have become very good at recently.
Hart was a guy that I was super impressed with in Alabama. I was hoping to have him in my last mock draft, but he was already gone. Hart is something that the Lions could really use. A big bodied six-foot-two corner that can be a nice matchup with some of the leagues bigger outside receivers that gave the Lions smaller corners a lot of trouble this season.
Hart, like Brownlee, also has good vision out there and is able to spot things and make plays. Watch how he spots the run here and gets in for the TFL.
Here's the second pick that I got from the Panthers in the trade down. This one got the Lions into the fourth round when they didn't have a pick. It's a good thing that I got this pick because it allowed me to take Cooper Beebe here. Beebe is arguably the last starting caliber guard left in this draft in my opinion. I took one in the second round in the last draft, so there's some value this time around.
Beebe was very good at Kansas State. He allowed two sacks in three seasons there and PFF had him graded out in the 80's in every season. PFF also had him as their seventh highest graded guard in the country last year. Even better than that, and Jared Goff will love this, Beebe had the third highest pass block grade in the country with a 90.4. This guy is ready to go.
I'm going to keep bringing it up till I'm blue in the face. The Lions need a big receiver that can catch contested catches. Johnson is both of those things. He's 6-foot-3 and has a contested catch percentage of 81.8%. The guy makes catches when he needs to. That's what the Lions just don't have right now. They have guys that can catch the ball and do things for sure, but when it comes to being in the red zone and going up against a guy and grabbing the catch over them, they don't have that. Johnson can be that guy.
The Lions have a guy in Sam LaPorta, but I would really like to find him a reliable number two and I think Wiley can be that guy. I was very impressed with him at the Senior Bowl. Not just because he can catch, but because of the aggressiveness he had before the catch. Wiley had one rep where you could hear his hands smacking up against his defender right before he made the catch from the stands.
The video doesn't do it justice. The angle of the video doesn't either. Wiley crashed into this guy so fast that it looks like he didn't even touch him. Then he made the one handed catch.
The moment I saw that I thought Dan Campbell would probably like that.
Start the draft with a Missouri guy and end it with a Missouri guy. The Lions need a kicker and they need one that can bail them out in long situations if they need it. Mevis is a guy that can hit from distance. He hit from 50 plus multiple times this season including a clutch 61-yarder for the win against Kansas State.
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