Nearly a week after they demoted him from the starting lineup and put him on the trading block, the Detroit Lions are still looking for a landing spot for Jamie Collins.
“We’re still working on it right now,” Lions coach Dan Campbell said Monday. “That’s still in the works.”
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The Lions benched Collins last week and decided to go young at their buck linebacker position. Rookie Derrick Barnes started Sunday’s loss to the Baltimore Ravens and split playing time about equally with Jalen Reeves-Maybin.
Campbell said last week the Lions had multiple suitors for Collins and hoped to have a deal in place “sooner than later.”
It is unclear how many teams have legitimate interest in Collins, though judging by the lack of a deal, there are not many.
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Collins turns 32 next month, is considered on the decline as a player and has about $3 million remaining on his contract this season. More than a third of the league — 11 teams, according to the salary cap tracking website Spotrac — has less than $3 million in available cap space.
The Lions are expected to continue playing Barnes and Reeves-Maybin at the inside linebacker position next to Alex Anzalone for the foreseeable future, though Campbell said communication issues between the linebacking corps and secondary accounted for several of the coverage busts that led to big Ravens pass plays Sunday.
Collins was inactive against the Ravens.
“We’ve got a lot of babies out there and they made some young errors, for sure,” Campbell said. “But they’re not the only ones. So some of our veterans, man, they have to step up and they have to be much more clear and they have to be loud. That’ll be a major point of emphasis this week is our communication and we’re not going to allow it to go any other way. If I have to stop practice and I have to see demonstrative hand signals and screaming and everything it takes, we’re going to do it cause those, we can clean all that stuff up. But that’s got to be — we have to do it. We have to.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.