When the Detroit Lions bundled three draft picks in a trade package and sent them to the Minnesota Vikings on Thursday night, it wasn’t some spontaneous action. Lions GM Brad Holmes and his Minnesota counterpart, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, had agreed to the basic framework of the trade well before the first round of the 2022 NFL draft.
In a great interview with Dave Birkett of the Detroit Free Press, Holmes explained that the Lions chose to be aggressive there to land one of the top receivers two weeks before the draft. Everyone in Allen Park — notably head coach Dan Campbell and owner Shiela Ford Hamp — agreed this was the proper course of action, so Holmes got busy on the phones.
Holmes called four teams around No. 12, both before and after the Vikings pick, and all four said they were interested in moving down, with everyone realizing contingencies were attached.
A few days later, Holmes followed up with Adofo-Mensah to finalize the parameters of the deal, and after working the phones the morning of the draft, he called the Vikings’ first-year GM around 3 or 4 p.m. Thursday from the Lions’ Allen Park practice facility.
We learned a few things here…
First, the Lions really wanted to upgrade the wide receiving group and had no qualms about parting with picks 32 and 34 to make that happen. That indicates they valued Williams significantly higher than any wideout (Christian Watson, Jahan Dotson, Wan’Dale Robinson, John Metchie) generally projected in that range of the draft.
Second, they valued Williams enough to send those picks to a division rival. While the taboo of intradivisional trading is somewhat overblown, it’s still a different beast than making this sort of trade with the Texans in the AFC South at No. 13, as an example. Facing the other side of the trade coin twice a year is a lot different than playing it once every four seasons. Holmes and the Lions believed it was that important to get Williams.
Also, it reinforces what Holmes stated several times this offseason: they were actively looking to move around in the draft. While we didn’t know exactly how that would play out, Holmes wasn’t just feeding us a line.
