Brad Holmes has kept nearly all his draft picks to have Detroit Lions eyeing new heights

In three years of acquiring players for the Detroit Lions, Brad Holmes has made the most of his time and has done an excellent job stocking the roster with talent and promise.

It hasn’t been an easy process, but it has been one that has brought the general manager, coach Dan Campbell and the entire team to the edge of being considered a legitimate championship contender. On Friday, I asked Holmes about his confidence in the ability of this roster to win its first division title in 30 years.

“Very high,” he said without hesitation.

That is not a typical answer from most GMs before the season starts. The usual play is to convey optimism while tempering expectations.

But Holmes knows what he has, because he knows where he’s been and how he and the Lions have gotten to this point, this precipice of such heightened expectations.

“I do think that we’ve — let’s call it ‘took our medicine,’ in the past couple of years,” he said. “Me and Dan talk about it all the time. We’ve coached the Senior Bowl. We’ve had to do ‘Hard Knocks.’ We’ve done all that. We’ve gone through a lot of darkness to get to this point.”

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Holmes and Campbell started by defining what a football player was to them. Holmes said they came up with this definition: “Smart, passionate, instinctive, relentless, tough, gritty.”

The one attribute Holmes didn’t mention was talent. Frankly, it’s a given. Every NFL-worthy player is talented, if only to varying degrees. But the key to Holmes’ roster acquisitions was also the hard choices he made to stick to his definition and pass on players who didn’t fit the description by being “very strategic and selective in that process.”

“A lot of talented football players that we did not draft,” he said, “a lot of talented football players we did not sign in free agency, talented football players we did not put a claim in for. So it kind of got us to this point, but we feel good.”

Feeling "good" has to be an understatement for Holmes. Not only did he snag one of the best steals of the draft in recent years by taking Pro Bowl receiver Amon-Ra St. Brown in the fourth round of his first draft, but all of his 23 draft picks in three years — except running back Jermar Jefferson, a 2021 seventh-rounder who was waived/injured — are on the team’s roster in some capacity.

People might quibble over some of the roster decisions — even I wonder why Holmes kept oft-injured cornerback Ifeatu Melifonwu, who has played very little since he was drafted in the third round in 2021. But hey, who deserves a roster spot is one of the longest running parlor games around NFL training camps.

The fact remains: The Lions have kept nearly all of Holmes’ draft picks over the past three years. I asked him if he felt a sense of pride over that achievement, but he wouldn’t go quite that far.

“Yeah, I mean I don’t,” he said. “Yeah, I guess you look back at it, you feel good about it. But we just focus on selecting the right players and selecting good football players that fit us.”

One of the reasons for Holmes’ success rate has been his approach of choosing players in late rounds.

“I mean when it gets into the late rounds — sixth-, seventh-rounders — those picks aren’t just throwaway picks or picks just throwing a dart,” he said. “I mean that’s a concentrated, intentional pick on those guys.”

So rest easy, Lions fans. You no longer have to pretend you’re OK with your GM taking a long-snapper in the sixth round and then cutting him.

It won’t always be this way for Holmes. In the near future, he’s going to have to let some of his draft picks go. Like a cupboard finally filled, there comes a point when there isn’t enough room to fit everything. Even fine china has to be replaced at some point.

For now though, Holmes should celebrate his accomplishment, because it has brought this team to a level of heightened expectations this city has rarely seen in three decades.

Contact Carlos Monarrez: cmonarrez@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @cmonarrez.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Brad Holmes' hit on draft picks promises new heights for Detroit Lions