Detroit Lions tantalizingly close to tasting rewards of marshmallow experiment

Just wait.

Brad Holmes told himself those words over and over in his first season as Detroit Lions general manager in 2021.

In his car on the way to work. In his office as he watched film. And when he made his way down the hall to visit Lions coach Dan Campbell.

The Lions went 3-13-1 that fall in what Holmes admits now was the first year of a rebuild. They lost five games by four points or less, three on field goals as time expired, and ended the season with three wins in their final six games while fielding one of the thinnest rosters in the NFL.

They had no receivers. Every starter on their offensive line missed time with injuries. And two of their best defensive players tore their Achilles tendons early in the year.

But Holmes saw something that fall — over and over again — that convinced him the rebuild he and Campbell were overseeing was on track.

“It sucks to lose, it does,” Holmes told the Free Press this week. “And especially when you lose like that. Like if you just get your ass whipped, you just get your ass whipped and you’re like hats off to them, they just beat our ass. Like when Cincinnati rolled us that year, it was what it was.

SHE'S THE BOSS: Lions owner Sheila Hamp has been bold, different and smart. It's paying dividends

“But those games just like, bro, it hurts, man. It sucks. But that next morning, man, I was just like, ‘Whoo, just wait, just wait, just wait.’ Like we haven’t even used these first-round picks and all this stuff. We haven’t had the cash to spend. We haven’t even had that yet, and I’m just like, everybody was new, coaches all that, and I was just seeing how Dan had those guys ready to go every week and I was like, ‘Oh yeah.’”

Holmes clapped his hands while he talked and gripped an imaginary steering wheel as if he was making his morning commute again.

After one loss — he doesn’t remember which one — he stopped by Campbell’s office to talk.

“I was like, ‘What’s up?’ And he goes, ‘Yessir!’” Holmes recalled, chuckling at the thought. “And then he was like, he was talking about what we’re going to do this week, and he was like, ‘We’re going to score 30, 40 points this week.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeaaah.’ I just was driving in saying, ‘Just watch, it’s going to come.’ So that right there, and that’s why grit is all over this place, because when it gets dark, that’s just who me and Dan are and that’s how we’re wired.”

Slowly, the dark that’s enveloped the Lions franchise has turned to light.

The offensive line is healthy. The defense has been revamped. And even if questions remain at receiver, the Lions will open the season Thursday against the Kansas City Chiefs with one of the best rosters in the NFL.

Holmes said the rebuild, which he initially termed a “retool,” is “ahead of schedule just because of the young players that have produced for us rather early.” And it all started with the plan he and Campbell hatched when they united in the rare arranged marriage that worked.

Marshmallow treats

The Lions set out on parallel coach and general manager searches when they overhauled their franchise after their disastrous 2020 season. Campbell and Holmes had never met before they were hired in January of 2021, and when they came to town they were given one franchise-changing move to make.

Matthew Stafford wanted out of Detroit after 12 seasons as a Lion, and Holmes’ first act as GM was to shop his quarterback to the highest bidder.

Five teams made initial offers, including the Carolina Panthers, whose tempting package included their first-round pick. The Lions already owned the seventh pick in the draft, and adding Carolina’s one slot later at No. 8 would give Holmes the chance to add two blue-chip talents to his roster.

As Holmes weighed the offer, the Los Angeles Rams swooped in with a package that better fit his vision — a starting quarterback in Jared Goff, a third-round pick and two future firsts. He jumped at the bid and the chance at delayed gratification.

“That’s how I’m normally wired,” Holmes said. “That’s something that I teach my children. Everybody knows about the marshmallow test and all that stuff.”

In the Stanford marshmallow experiment of the 1970s, a psychology professor sat 600 children down at a table and gave them the choice between one marshmallow immediately, or two if they could wait 15 minutes. The children who waited generally went on to experience greater success and self-control later in life.

Holmes applied the same principle to the Lions’ rebuild, figuring the long-term payoff of having multiple first-round picks in 2022-23, plus a stable starter at the most important position in football, trumped the ability to add two high-level talents to an otherwise barren roster.

With little money to spend in free agency that spring, Holmes used the guidance of Lions chief operating officer Mike Disner, then the team’s senior vice president of football administration, to play the compensatory pick game.

The Lions signed a handful of targeted free agents, players like Alex Anzalone, Charles Harris and Kalif Raymond, to comp formula-friendly deals. And their diligence there yielded three extra picks in the 2022 draft. Holmes used those picks to procure more talent, and the Lions now have one of youngest, deepest rosters in the NFL.

“I don’t know (where our roster ranks) from a league standpoint,” Holmes said. “I mean, that’s all subjective. I just have a lot of joy — me and Dan have a lot of peace and joy and we sleep well at night that we have a roster full of football players with talent. It’s not just talent. Like, we have football players with talent. That’s first. It starts with football players.”

CARLOS MONARREZ: I’ve looked hard, but I don't see any way Lions don’t win the NFC North title

The Lions got off to a brutal start again last year, losing six of their first seven games, and Holmes saw the chance to procure more ammunition for his rebuild at the trade deadline when he shipped tight end T.J Hockenson to the Minnesota Vikings for a swap of draft picks.

On the current 53-man roster, the Lions have 19 draft picks from the past three seasons, three undrafted free agents signed under Holmes and Campbell and five players acquired via trade or waiver since 2021. Just 11 players remain from the roster Holmes and Campbell inherited when they got to Detroit.

“No one has margin to throw away a season,” Holmes said. “Not coming off a 3-13-1 (record) and we were 1-6 (at the time of the Hockenson trade. Neither) me nor Dan had room to, ‘Ah, (forget) it. We’ll just — we’ll just trade away a good player.’ No. we were like, ‘Look man, we’ll be just fine.’ But the extra capital that we can gain to help the future, on top of what we already had, and we felt confident in our process of player acquisition, we just keep rolling.”

'We'll see'

The Lions finished last season on a tear, winning eight of their final 10 games to narrowly miss the playoffs.

They did so with a flare and flavor that made them one of the hottest draws in the NFL, but nothing they did during that hot streak or since has compromised their process.

The Lions added three big-name free agents to their secondary this offseason in Cam Sutton, C.J. Gardner-Johnson and Emmanuel Moseley, but only Sutton got a multi-year contract. They drafted four rookies who should contribute immediately, but Holmes pointed to the selection of second-round pick Brian Branch as evidence they weren’t just seeing high-floor, ready-to-contribute players.

The Lions signed Gardner-Johnson to play slot cornerback, figuring Kerby Joseph and Tracy Walker would start at safety. When they drafted Branch, Holmes figured he’d probably begin his NFL career as a backup and play on special teams. But Branch won the slot corner job with an impressive camp, bumping Gardner-Johnson to safety and Walker to the bench.

“Now it’s like, holy shit, man, now this guy, he’s taken over,” Holmes said. “But make a long story short, we never consciously said, we got to push all our chips in. We just kept the same process in terms of the players that we draft and being very strategic. We had more resources to spend, but we still had to find the right guys. We’ll always have that approach.”

The Lions have wholeheartedly embraced the expectations that have followed the success they had last season, and that come with their improved roster.

More: Fans ask Mike Tirico all the time if 2023 Detroit Lions are for real — even in Paris

Campbell said he and Holmes started with the end in mind — winning a Super Bowl — when they first teamed up before quickly returning to reality.

“You have this vision of where you want to go, where you see it going and what it’s going to take to get there,” he said. “You don’t always know the timeline, but you know you’ve got a lot of work ahead of you and so I think we’re both very pleased.”

Holmes said he has a “very high” level of confidence in his team’s ability to win a division title this fall, something the Lions have not done in 30 years. And though he wouldn’t say it specifically, if they do that, that would be tantalizingly close to reaping the rewards of their own marshmallow experiment.

“Look, we’ll see next Thursday,” Holmes said. “We’re about to play the champs. We’ll see how it is. Now, say we compete and play hard. Well, everybody knows we’ve been doing that. That’s not going to be a surprise to people. But if you win that game, now I do think that’ll be a little bit, ‘OK, all right, these guys are for real.’”

Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.

This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: How Brad Holmes, Dan Campbell built Lions into Super Bowl contender