The Detroit Lions often tell a lot about their NFL Draft intentions by the players they decide to meet. Whether it’s formal meetings at the NFL Combine or pre-draft visits to their team facility in Allen Park, the Lions’ draft history has been littered with players they’ve done additional work on.
So every year, we like to track which players have had some extra contact with the team in order to see if there are any hints as to what the Lions may do during NFL Draft weekend.
This year, we opted not
to track reports on Senior Bowl, Shrine Bowl, or NFL Combine visits. This isn’t because those visits aren’t important—they are—but they’re often reported haphazardly. For example, just about every team meets with every player at the Senior Bowl and Shrine Bowl, so that list wouldn’t be particularly insightful. As for the NFL Combine, we know that formal Detroit Lions meetings are often a good sign of serious interest, but it is not always made abundantly clear from reports—or the players themselves—whether meetings with teams were considered formal (with the team in a private setting) or informal (in passing or one-on-one with a specific coach). Formal meetings carry weight. Informal ones, not as much.
Another thing muddying the waters this year is that the Lions did not hold a “local pro day,“ during which they test and meet prospects from the local Michigan area. Lions general manager Brad Holmes explained the decision earlier this week.
“Just internally we kind of made a decision to utilize that time for some other things, but still utilize the local visits as well,” Holmes said. “We still utilize the local visits, but we just made the decision really last summer to do away with the pro day.”
So with that, we’re only left with the reported pre-draft visits to the Lions’ Allen Park facility, and, admittedly, there aren’t a lot of them so far. The Lions appear to be keeping things quite private this year.
But if you are unaware of the pre-draft visit process, here’s a quick explainer. Teams can host 30 prospects for these pre-draft visits, where testing, interviewing, and film breakdown happen. But players in each team’s local area do not count against that 30-player limit. Because those visits are basically identical from the players’ standpoint, we’ve combined them all in the list below.
If you are more interested in a list of all of the other kind of visits, commenter FordFieldRoar did compile a good list including Combine visits as well.
Without further ado, here is the list of pre-draft visits that have been publicly reported so far:
