There are some Detroit Lions fans who are not happy with Brad Holmes and his lack of picking up anyone on the defensive line in free agency.
There's a beleif out there that based off the Lions' game against the Commanders, the Eagles win over the Chiefs in the Super Bowl that the Lions have a bad defensive line and desparelty need something that basically no team has unles they were lucky to draft both of them. Two premier pass rushers.
The fear that those fans have is that the Lions believe their defensive line is already set, and guess what, for the most part the Lions do feel that way. At the League Meetings in Florida last week, Holmes talked about how good he felt about the defensive line.
"Really excited about our depth and what we were able to acquire on the D-line. Holmes said. "To be able to get Levi back, he was rolling with his pressures, and hopefully he can get home even more so. That's going to help out a lot more. Hopefully, with bringing Davenport back, hopefully his injury luck is on the right side of things. That frees up Josh Paschal to be able to do more from a pass-rush standpoint, really more interior-wise than outside. We just had to use Paschal as an edge rusher because of circumstances with injuries and all that.
"So, we feel good where we're at. To be able to get Lopez to fill — he's more of a first and second-down guy, run defender — but to be able to have him back and still got Reader. So, we feel pretty good. Actually, we're getting kinda heavy on the defensive line. Not saying that any position will be ignored, but so far, I feel like we've had success."
This is the thing that just keeps getting ignored. The Lions' defense was really good last year, even with the injuries to a point. They were very good when they were healthy. We're talking about a team that was top five in DVOA on defense up until Week 11. Injuries just got to be too much.
So while it might feel like the Lions can succeed without a second elite edge rusher, that's just not the case. In fact, Holmes talked about how it's really impossible to have multiple elite edge rushers when there's only a small handful in the league. They're happy to just have one of them at this point.
As Holmes said, it's not like the Lions are saying they're done. They will very likely look to grab an edge rusher in the draft, and maybe they'll grab one more after that, too. But if they decide to go a different route in the first round, don't be shocked. They feel they have the defensive line set and ready to go for the most part.
