It’s Tuesday, the NFL draft is just a little more than two weeks away and it’s time for some notes …
• Last week, we detailed an underrated element of the Detroit Lions’ proposal for open playoff seeding (regardless of whether a team won its division), and commissioner Roger Goodell’s support for it, which was telegraphed with his decision to table a vote until May.
Goodell knew he didn’t have the votes. My understanding is that only a handful of teams were with Detroit’s proposal. He was also determined not to let it die.
And the reason why, as we said last week, has as much to do with restoring stakes to the end of the regular season as it does fairness, at least for Goodell. The NFL’s senior director of football data and analytics (and my old friend and high school teammate) Mike Lopez passed these numbers along shortly after I wrote on the subject, which further bolsters the case.
There was also a healthy discussion on a DET proposal to seed postseason teams by their win pct.
— Michael Lopez (@StatsbyLopez) April 2, 2025
This proposal is as much about the Regular Season as it is the Postseason.
In 2024, this would have a notable impact on the competitiveness of Week 18 games pic.twitter.com/bR6z0ZKQ0k
If you look at that graphic, you’ll see five of 14 playoff teams rested their quarterbacks in Week 18 last year. All knew whether they’d be home or away in the wild-card round ahead of that week, and were almost certainly locked into whether they’d be home or away in the divisional round, too. So knowing that home field was very, very unlikely to be impacted by the result of that week’s game, they rested their quarterbacks.
Conversely, under the Lions’ proposal, the Houston Texans, Green Bay Packers, Los Angeles Rams, Washington Commanders and Philadelphia Eagles would all have been playing to lock up home field in either the wild-card round or the divisional round in Week 18. So, naturally, you’d get more engagement from those teams in how they approach the regular-season finales and, presumably, better football.
There’s also the looming 18-game element to all this. Coaches will tell you that the NFL going to 17 games in 2021 shifted the approach of a lot of folks in handling the end of the regular season. Logically, managing players would be an even bigger piece in decision making on these things for coaches with another game for all of them to make it through.
One potential compromise that’s been discussed was leaving the first round as is, but then reseeding after that. Last year, for example, the top-seeded Lions had to play a 12-win Commanders team in the divisional round, while the second-seeded Eagles got the 10-win Rams. If you reseeded, you would have gotten Lions-Rams and Eagles-Commanders instead, which might’ve been fairer to Detroit, while creating more incentive for teams to keep their foot on the gas in Week 18.
Anyway, I’d imagine there’ll be some spirited discussion on this when the owners meet again in Minneapolis in May. And I think Goodell will be taking a side in that discussion.
• Plans were announced for Rams Village in Woodland Hills, Calif.—about 25 miles northwest of both downtown Los Angeles and SoFi Stadium in Inglewood—by the team on Monday. It’s worth paying attention to, because I think it’s another way for that franchise to enhance its position as a destination for veteran players.
It sounds like, at this point, with all the hoops that need to be jumped through, it’ll take until 2028 at the earliest for the Rams to be in their new building.
Still, no such light has existed at the end of that tunnel before for the Rams. Until a year ago, when they moved onto the property at Woodland Hills, they were twice as far from L.A. proper as they are now. They were in trailers then. They’re still in trailers now—remember Sean McVay’s windowless office?
But at least now players can see where this is going and that the team is investing back into them with a state-of-the-art facility coming. It’ll get them to a place where they can keep pace with teams such as the Minnesota Vikings, Miami Dolphins, Dallas Cowboys and Jacksonville Jaguars, who’ve opened new facilities over the past decade. For the Vikings, the brass saw it as imperative to construct something appealing, to give players a reason to be in Minnesota in the offseason. The Rams don’t need the same sort of inducement to get guys to L.A., but a nicer building certainly will help.
And, of course, it’ll help line the pockets of ownership, too. The drawings look an awful lot like The Star in Frisco, Texas, where Cowboys’ headquarters serves as the epicenter for a retail/residential/office/hotel development. Which is a way for an owner to create revenue off a project that would, on paper, simply be pouring back into his football team.
But so long as the football facility is first class, that’s nothing to complain about.
These projects can make it so everyone wins.
• Good choice by Trey Lance to go to the Los Angeles Chargers, with an accomplished offensive coordinator in Greg Roman, who has the infrastructure scheme-wise to get the most out of him.
I’ll be interested to see him play in that offense this summer.
The problem, though, is that what most folks who’ve worked with Lance say about him is he just needs to go out and play. In his past seven years of football, going back to his graduation from Marshall High School in Minnesota, he’s gotten into just 31 games and started 22 of them. As such, he needs to continue to build his mental Rolodex of defensive schemes, fronts and coverages he’s played against—it’s just not there now.
And I don’t know how that actually happens. When you’ve invested the third pick in the draft in a guy, you’d think you’d give him time to do that, as the San Francisco 49ers planned to before Lance got hurt in 2022 and Brock Purdy took over. When you’re taking a flier on him, and have Justin Herbert, you probably aren’t going to give a guy such as Purdy the game time he needs.
Which is why it’s usually best that quarterbacks get a lot of starts in college before turning pro.
• I like the Commanders hiring Wes Welker in a sort of dual role.
His title will be personnel analyst, and he’ll be working both with GM Adam Peters on the scouting side and his old quarterback from Texas Tech, Kliff Kingsbury, on the offensive coaching staff. And those relationships are key to how I’d guess this will work.
Welker was with Peters as a player in both New England and Denver, and then was a coach while Peters served as John Lynch’s No. 2 in San Francisco. So he has a very solid idea of what Peters likes in players. All the same, Welker, like Kingsbury, was one of the guys there at a grassroots level, under Mike Leach, for the offense Kingsbury now runs in D.C.
So, to me, all that background and institutional knowledge should give Welker great insight on what’s being built, and help Kingsbury, Dan Quinn and Peters marry together all facets of the football operation.
• One interesting leftover from my conversation with new Las Vegas Raiders QB Geno Smith last week: He’s using his age as a motivator. He turns 35 in October, and, clearly, the idea that puts him deep into the back nine of his career irks the 13th-year vet.
“I’m still getting better at my age,” Smith says. “And I hate that people try to use my age against me. I’m stronger and faster than all these young guys, and I can throw farther and better. So that’s not an issue. But I think they were trying to use some things against me, and I just had to get into a situation where everyone believed in me and everyone was going in the same direction.”
He’s found it, clearly, in Vegas. And on the age thing, it’s worth noting, too, that he’ll get the benefit of working with Tom Brady’s body coach, Alex Guerrero, who was working with the Raiders last year (and has worked closely with some of their stars, such as Maxx Crosby).
• I’m not sure why an NFL team would sign off on a star player going to the Olympics to play flag football. There’s unnecessary injury risk. They’d be missing a good chunk of training camp, and maybe additional time to train for it. They’d be away from all the resources they have in an NFL facility to prepare for the season. And flag football isn’t remotely the same sport as tackle football, so it’s not like this would be the manifestation of some lifelong dream.
Then again, I’m not really sure why flag football is in the Olympics to begin with.
(I do, however, understand how the league wants to export the game, and believes it’s easier and cheaper to export flag to try to get a football in a foreign kid’s hands.)
• For what it’s worth, after Abdul Carter, I’ve heard a lot of people putting the edge prospects in the draft in a lot of different orders. I’d say Georgia’s Jalon Walker is a solid bet to be the second one off the board. And after that, I genuinely don’t know who’ll be next.
• The Jaguars’ decision to pick up Travon Walker’s fifth-year option is a good example of how the numbers on the option have been outpaced by the market. Walker’s a workmanlike edge player from Jacksonville—but by no means what the team hoped he’d become when he was drafted with the No. 1 pick. But because the top of the edge rusher market is now firmly in the 30s and 40s in millions per year, $14.75 million for another season of Walker in 2026 doesn’t seem so bad.
• I’d be pretty surprised if Jalen Milroe was drafted in the first round, regardless of whether he was invited to Green Bay for the draft.
• I guess we’ll all be watching Pat McAfee’s Big Night AHT Wednesday on YouTube. Any day now, Aaron …
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Stage Set for Debate Over Lions’ Open NFL Playoff Seeding Proposal .
