Last week, the conversation centered on the best contracts Brad Holmes has put together during his nearly six years running the Detroit Lions. That’s the easy part. The harder question is where Holmes has missed.
No general manager is going to bat 1.000, and Holmes has had a few deals that didn’t age the way Detroit hoped. Some were free-agent swings. Others were extensions that looked solid at the time and then went sideways fast.
If you want to start at the beginning, Michael Brockers is one of the first names that comes up. Holmes traded for him and then gave him a three-year, $24 million extension.
Brockers did bring value in the room and helped set the culture, but the production never matched the price. He appeared in just 22 games, finished with 56 tackles and one sack, and was gone after two seasons.
Detroit ended up paying roughly $14 million for him, which isn’t catastrophic, but it also wasn’t a great use of cap space.
The 2023 offseason gave Holmes a few more candidates for this conversation. Emmanuel Moseley got a one-year, $6 million deal, but he wasn’t ready coming off a torn ACL and then tore the other ACL once he finally got back on the field.
Cam Sutton signed a three-year, $33 million contract and delivered one mediocre season before legal issues forced his release. Even C.J.
Gardner-Johnson’s one-year, $8 million deal didn’t work out. David Montgomery, of course, was the exception and a steal.
DJ Reader belongs in the mix, too. He was fine in Detroit, but not enough to make the two-year, $22 million contract feel like a win. The comparison point is hard to ignore: he just signed a two-year, $12.5 million deal with the Giants.
Then there are the extensions that got wrecked by injuries. Tracy Walker’s three-year, $25 million deal became a disaster when he tore his Achilles three games into it and never really recovered.
Still, that one feels more like brutal luck than a true contract mistake. The same basic argument applies to Alim McNeill’s four-year, $97 million extension, which was quickly interrupted by an ACL injury.
That deal still has three years left, so McNeill has time to change the story.
So if you’re trying to pick Holmes’ worst contract as Lions GM, there are a few strong contenders. Some were too expensive.
Some collapsed because of health. Some never gave Detroit the return the team expected.
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