Justin Licker was a few blocks into a walk with his wife, Therese, and their dog, a Chihuahua rat terrier named Dolly Pawton, when his phone buzzed on a day in late August a year ago.
A scout in the Detroit Lions’ pro personnel department, Licker was enjoying his first day off after training camp and the most hectic stretch of a pro scout’s life, but he couldn’t escape the news cycle of the NFL.
The Dallas Cowboys traded Micah Parsons to the Green Bay Packers that day, and Licker knew that late-afternoon vibration meant the NFL’s daily personnel notice was out.
He grabbed his phone, opened the report and scrolled through the day’s transactions, a mix of practice squad signings, free agent additions and veteran cuts. There were 146 moves in all,
not including free agent tryouts, but one line halfway down the first page of waiver requests stood out:
Harper, Thomas DB Notre Dame (1)* PS: EXC
Licker stopped and told his wife they had to turn around and head home.
“She's pretty go-with-the-flow,” he said. “She understands that some things are imminent.”
While the rest of the NFL was consumed by the blockbuster trade involving one of the league’s best pass rushers, Licker rushed home to watch all-22 tape of Las Vegas Raiders safety Thomas Harper, an otherwise anonymous cut.
He flipped open his laptop when he walked in the door, saw Harper had barely played in the preseason because of injury and called up a few games Harper started as a rookie in 2024. He watched 50 to 75 snaps, then texted his boss, then-Lions director of pro scouting Rob Lohman.
Licker told Lohman there was a player he liked on the waiver wire, someone the staff had glossed over days earlier. Lohman texted back to say he already was looking at Harper’s film.
When he finished, Lohman texted Lions assistant general manager Ray Agnew and GM Brad Holmes, who watched Harper’s tape that evening and decided he was worth putting a waiver claim in for the final spot on the Lions’ 53-man roster.
At 4 p.m. the next day, Harper became a Lion – the Buffalo Bills were the only other team to put a claim on the safety, but were behind the Lions in the waiver order.
By the end of the season, Harper was an integral part of the secondary and a feather in the cap of a pro department that wears many hats over the course of an NFL season.
For the Lions and most teams, pro scouts provide a road map for free agency, advance scout opponents and manage their roster’s inevitable in-season churn. If the draft is the lifeblood of the roster building process – the Lions first acquired 30 of the players on their 53-man roster through the draft or undrafted free agency – the acquisitions spearheaded by the pro department are the other organs that make the body work.
'Every player, every year'
Lohman, who was promoted to vice president of roster operations/evaluations this summer, likes to joke he “was the fifth-string receiver on a wishbone team” growing up on Long Island in New York.
He loved baseball as a kid, but stumbled into a career in the NFL when a college assistant from South Carolina stopped by to recruit his school one day his junior year.
Lohamn’s coach told the recruiter he didn’t have any players to offer up, but there was one kid who could help the program another way. Lohman visited campus that summer and enrolled the next fall, and even though the football staff was fired before he started classes, another assistant who stayed on helped him land a job as a student assistant.
Lohman did an internship at Hofstra and another with the New York Islanders, and when he graduated with a degree in sports management, he rejoined Hofstra as unpaid help working essentially full-time. He lived at home, took his lunch to work and did a little of everything on a staff that included future NFL coaches Dan Quinn and Raheem Morris.
From there, he landed a graduate assistant job at Syracuse (on the same staff as former Lions coach Matt Patricia), parlayed that into his first scouting gig with the expansion Houston Texans before joining the Lions in 2007.
In Houston, college scouts helped evaluate pro players, and as the Texans’ northeast scout, Lohman drew the task of watching the New England Patriots and others in preseason games.
“They sent me a video of, I remember the Patriots, and I think it was 2004 or 2005,” Lohman said. “You had to go through and literally you had your group of players and you have to just watch the game, you couldn't just watch each guy individually. And I just remember watching this – we had a little different criteria for players. We would grade all the draft picks, even the first-round or second-rounders, as rookies. And I remember watching this guy, I was like, ‘Hey, he’s pretty good. Oh, man.’ And it was Vince Wilfork. Like, ‘Yeah, this guy’s got a chance.’”
The Lions’ scouting processes are much more streamlined now thanks to technological advances and their own unique way of doing work.
The goal still is to get at least “one report on every player, every year by somebody in the pro department,” new director of pro scouting Joe Kelleher said. And they start with every cut candidate on a preseason roster in a project that produces evaluations of about 1,000 players.
Scouts can watch film of only the snaps they need when a player is on the field, grades are based strictly on preseason performances – “We’re trying not to say like a legacy grade, like, ‘This guy’s been a starter before but he doesn’t look good in this preseason but I’m going to grade him like a starter,’” Kelleher said – and players are given designations such as Pro Bowler, very good starter, starter, backup, practice squad candidate and tryout guy.
The Lions split the players in the project up by position – Lohman took the lead on quarterbacks and receivers this year, and cross-checked players who attained a certain grade; Kelleher oversaw every position as director; Licker did most offensive linemen, running backs and linebackers; pro scout Blake Ask had cornerbacks; and scouting assistants Bri Howard, John Collins and Brandon Crank and others in the personnel department filled in the gaps – and try to get grades on every player within two days of those players appearing in a preseason game.
The initial grade is updated after Week 2 of the preseason, and by Week 3, the department focuses on a small subset of players who fit the Lions’ style of play, have a certain grade and could be available at the roster cut deadline.
This year, Lohman, Kelleher and Agnew met the Tuesday of the final week of the preseason and pared the pool of potential cuts to 80 to 100 players they wanted to monitor at the roster deadline.
On Friday, Aug. 28, the day before the Lions’ preseason finale against the Indianapolis Colts and two days before NFL teams had to cut to a 53-man roster, about eight members of the Lions front office and scouting staff held a two-hour video conference call to go over that group.
The primary scout for each position led a discussion of the players on the list, and the group shared their thoughts on who might fit and in what role. Every scout evaluated players on their own, and Holmes consumed all the work.
“He generally keeps his opinion to himself because he doesn’t want to influence anybody,” Lohman said. “What’s great about Brad and the process that we do here is that everybody has a voice. So you're able to say what you think about the player, and it's OK if you don't agree. It's OK if you and I see it differently. That's fine. In fact, it's actually encouraged: ‘I want to know what you think, not what you think I want you to think.”
Talent evaluation vs. roster building
Ultimately, the Lions decided not to claim a player at this year’s deadline after claiming two – defensive linemen Tyler Lacy and Tyrus Wheat, plus Harper two days later – last year. Only about 25 of the 80 to 100 players on the Lions’ whittled-down list became available at cuts, but Holmes decided none fit the roster better than the players the Lions already had.
Typically, Lions scouts spend a couple hours each day grading their own practice film to know who’s playing well, who’s not and where they might need an upgrade.
As cuts were reported throughout the day Aug. 30, the group watched a real-time feed of the news populate a tracking system designed by the Lions’ football information department. Cuts reported on social media showed up in the feed on a screen displayed in the team’s draft room and were designated official once confirmed by teams later in the day. The lists can be sequenced by position, team and grade to make them easy to sort.
When the NFL put out the day’s personnel notice around 8:30 p.m., Holmes, the pro department and others met to go over the list. They broke for an hour to watch film, reconvened around 10 and talked through potential waiver claims again before most headed to a hotel for a few hours of sleep.
“Talent evaluation and roster building are two entirely different things,” Lohman said. “I can tell you that guy's a great player. And yeah, maybe he's better in this certain area than this other player. But on our roster, he's not better because he doesn't do these other things that this player does. So that’s ultimately what it comes down to.”
Lohman said there were no real surprise cuts this year, and while the Lions didn’t make any immediate claims, the work the group did will pay dividends down the road.
Preseason evaluations form the basis of the “ready” lists the Lions keep at every position throughout the year, and it’s up to pro scouts to manage those lists for potential roster moves at their assigned positions. If the Lions need a practice squad player, depth backup or even potential starter, as they did late in the 2024 season when injuries decimated their front seven, Holmes consults those lists for his options.
“There may be a guy that we liked in the process and … maybe he gets cut in November,” Lohman said. “And what's going to happen is we're all going to look at it and we’re going to be like, ‘Oh yeah, we liked that guy.’ And then we're going to have a discussion about it. And maybe at that point, due to injuries where we're at on the roster, we have an opportunity to add that player, claim him off waiver, sign him to the practice squad, wherever it may be. But ultimately, the work we do now is never lost. We use it all the time.”
The Lions harkened back to their previous year’s work – each pro scout also has a group of teams to scout in-season – on last year’s deadline claims of Harper (because of his lack of preseason playing time) and Lacy, someone they deemed a surprise cut who wasn’t a big part of the preseason project.
Kelleher recalls sitting in the draft room and seeing Lacy’s name flash across the Lions’ internal cut tracker feed. He had scouted the Jacksonville Jaguars the two previous seasons and wrote Lacy up as a violent, versatile defensive lineman, and when the Lions met to discuss the league’s roster cuts that night he nominated Lacy as a player worth a claim.
“[They had] a staff change, a scheme change,” Kelleher said. “It raises an antenna as far as like, ‘Hey, keep an eye on this.’ But even then, we’re like, ‘Man, he was a productive player for them, at least those two years in his role, so they’ll find a way to keep him.’ And then when he did come free, you kind of zip through the preseason, you’re like, ‘I don’t see a difference in the physical ability of the player.’ So really it’s just a matter of, for them it was square peg, round hole. For us, it was square peg, square hole.”
Identifying Cade Mays in free agency
Lacy projects to start at big end for the Lions this season, and when he returns from a wrist injury, Cade Mays should be back in the starting lineup at center, too.
Mays was the Lions’ top free agent addition in March, though the process of identifying him as a potential replacement for Graham Glasgow started months earlier.
About 800 players become unrestricted free agents every spring, and the Lions’ pro staff is responsible for evaluating each one. The group meets for a couple hours one day every December to pare the full list of upcoming free agents to a more manageable group of 150 to 200 potential targets.
That list is presented to Holmes and Agnew in a January meeting, and after it’s refined again, Charlie Adkins, the Lions’ senior director of football administration, adds a financial projection of how much each player is worth on the open market.
Lions coaches add their evaluations after the season, and when money, talent and need line up, the Lions have their target.
Kelleher, who played offensive tackle and tight end at Butler, was the Lions’ lead offensive line evaluator the past few years. He ranked Mays near the top of his list of 10 or so signable centers as a big, physical aggressive player who still was ascending at the position after two years as a fill-in starter.
“For me, there isn’t one moment [that convinced me he was a fit],” Kelleher said. “Sometimes, especially with offensive line play, there’s a quiet consistency that comes to that. Like the Michael Oher ‘Blind Side’ block, driving the guy through the sideline and backplating him on the track in high school, that doesn’t happen in the NFL with rare exceptions. But the quiet consistency of a player, that really can stand out.”
Mays signed a three-year, $24 million deal in March, the fourth largest average annual value among free agent centers. But because there are so many layers to free agency, Kelleher said there was no personal sense of accomplishment when he signed, only the unhealthy thought of feeling like, “I need to find more.”
“The whole standing on the table metaphor, that [doesn’t really happen],” Kelleher said. “When we have these meetings, you’re not – let’s just say there’s a brevity to it. There’s a format that we use so you’re not talking and talking and talking. There’s an element you can convey or reiterate like, ‘Yeah, these are the things that really fit us.’ But from there, because I think with our process it’s so collaborative that it’s really there’s that one report but we make sure for players like that we have other members of our department cross check it, so we have their reports. And then obviously Brad is the king decision maker in the process.”
Advanced notice
When the Lions kicked off the 2023 playoffs with a wild-card game against the Los Angeles Rams, Kelleher was in Dallas scouting the Cowboys against the Packers.
The Lions were in line to play the Cowboys if both teams won their postseason opener. When Dallas lost, Kelleher caught an Uber back to his hotel to watch the Lions’ biggest game since he joined the team as a BLESTO college scout in 2011.
The Lions led, 24-23, with the ball and a chance to close out the game at the two-minute warning. Jared Goff threw an 11-yard pass to Amon-Ra St. Brown on second-and-9, and as Kelleher was ready to celebrate the franchise’s first playoff win in 32 years, the Dallas broadcast of the game cut to a special report about the weather.
“So in Dallas there was a winter storm that night, like it was actually cold enough where it was going to snow and to them that was like full-blown blizzard crisis mode,” Kelleher said. “So they literally cut away from our game to the special report. … I’m literally left with a cliffhanger.”
With most of his family, friends and co-workers at Ford Field, Kelleher called his mom in the Washington area to find out what happened. Two weeks later, Kelleher and Licker were on the road advancing the AFC championship in Baltimore as the Lions played the San Francisco 49ers for the right to go to the Super Bowl. Stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic as they left the stadium, they pulled off the road and watched the first half from a local brewery.
“This is something, your livelihood, you’re invested in it, you had a successful season,” Kelleher said. “You’re a small part of it but you’re in a unique situation where you’re not in a position to [watch it],”
As advanced scouts, Licker said the pro department’s job is to be “the SparkNotes for the coaches.”
Typically, the scout that advances a game works a week ahead on the schedule. Licker went to two New Orleans Saints games this preseason as the advance scout for the Lions’ Sept. 13 opener, and he and Ask will team up to advance next week’s game against the Bills because of the short work week before a Thursday night kickoff.
They don’t worry about X's and O's when they scout games in person; instead, they chart things coaches can’t see on the all-22 film like the timing of substitutions, hand signals and body language.
On the Monday of a normal game week, the advance scout spends 12 to 15 minutes briefing coaches on their upcoming opponent’s personnel, tendencies and injuries, then keeps the staff updated on news throughout the rest of the week as it happens.
“The deeper you get into the season the more what’s on the tape doesn’t explain what’s going on,” Licker said. “Why somebody’s not playing, injuries, how they’re rotating guys. You’re looking for very little edges.”
Ultimately, that’s the mantra of the department.
Lohman said good pro scouts are anticipatory, knowing problems inevitably spring up and making sure no stone is unturned so answers are ready when they happen.
“I think [the most rewarding thing is] when you add a player that helps us win games,” Lohman said. “It can be at any point. It can be in the preseason, it can be an in-season waiver claim. It can be, a couple years ago when we signed Al-Quadin Muhammad to the practice squad and we elevate him, he turns into a 10-sack guy. So that’s one we’re proud of as a pro department. Tyler Lacy and Thomas Harper last year, They wind up having big roles for us. It’s all those things.”
Dave Birkett covers the Lions for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Bluesky, X and Instagram at @davebirkett.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: How Lions pro personnel department is doing everything possible to gain edge
