Teddy Bridgewater is stepping away from football again, and this time the Detroit Lions are treating it like the end of the road.
Coach Dan Campbell said Sunday morning in Allen Park that Bridgewater is retiring, ending a brief return to Detroit after a year that already included one retirement announcement, a coaching stint and another comeback. The Lions moved him to the reserve/retired list before practice, and the ripple effect is immediate: the backup quarterback job is suddenly wide open.
“He’s going to step away,” Campbell said. “I’ve known Teddy a long time and, man, the human being is unbelievable.
Certainly the player. Everything that he’s about, the type of teammate he is, the way he prepares, always played the game up here and had a huge heart and he’s going to be missed.”
Bridgewater’s path with the Lions has been anything but linear. He backed up Jared Goff in 2023 and appeared in one regular-season game.
Late in that year, he said in an interview with the Free Press that he was retiring. Most of the 2024 season, he was back home coaching high school football at Miami Northwestern, his alma mater in Florida.
Then came another return. Bridgewater rejoined the Lions late in the 2024 season, completed his only pass in a playoff loss to the Washington Commanders, spent last season with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and came back to Detroit this spring. At the time, he said he still had “so much left in the tank.”
“The past couple years I was one foot in, one foot out, contemplating retirement, contemplating playing, coaching, doing all these different things,” Bridgewater said in March. “And now it's like, 'OK, I've coached, I know what that’s like.
I've been retired, I know what that's like. But I just want to keep playing ball.'”
Campbell, who knew Bridgewater from their time together with the New Orleans Saints when Bridgewater backed up Drew Brees in 2018-19, said he believes this retirement sticks. He pointed to the stretch in 2019 when Bridgewater filled in for an injured Brees and helped the Saints win five straight.
“I’ll never forget 2019 when Drew got injured,” Campbell said. “We had just gone out to the Rams, got beat out there, and Drew got his thumb [injury] and we lost him for five weeks and Teddy stepped in, we won five in a row, man.
That was Teddy. And then just his time being with us meant a lot, and it meant a lot to our guys, so he’s going to be missed.”
When asked what Bridgewater meant to him personally, Campbell got emotional.
“He meant a lot,” Campbell said.
With Bridgewater gone, the Lions are down to two quarterbacks: Goff and undrafted rookie free agent Luke Altmyer out of Illinois. Altmyer handled the backup reps during Bridgewater’s absence, and Campbell said the staff likes what it has seen so far.
“Luke is growing, Luke is getting better, he just needs reps,” Campbell said. “I mean, he needs a million reps.
But the reps that he has gotten to this point, he has improved and so we like him. But we are going to add somebody, and we’d like to add a veteran quarterback.
We’re hoping maybe something happens tomorrow, we’ll see. But yeah, that’s the plan.”
Campbell said the team could sign that veteran as early as Monday, and that player could be in line to play in Thursday night’s preseason opener against the Cincinnati Bengals.
The Lions also made a few other roster moves Sunday, signing cornerback Ryan Cooper and linebacker Amen Ogbongbemiga while waiving tight end Nick Muse.
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