The Seattle Seahawks were on the clock with the ninth pick in last week’s NFL draft when Detroit Lions general manager Brad Holmes called his counterpart with the Minnesota Vikings, Kwesi Adofo-Mensah, to check in on the trade they had agreed upon a few days earlier.
Holmes was looking to move up in Thursday’s first round and get a playmaking receiver to help his offense, and there was one pass-catcher in particular he had his eye on.
You still good, Holmes asked.
Yes, Adofo-Mensah replied. Are you?
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“I said, ‘Aaah, I don’t know. I’m still waiting,’ ” Holmes told the Free Press late Saturday after the draft, before heading home to catch up on some much-needed sleep. “He said, ‘Yeah, just let me know.'”
Holmes spent the next 30 or so minutes nervously waiting on the three teams in front of the Vikings to turn in their picks. More than a week earlier, he had set a plan in motion to get the Lions the rare “V12” type of player they needed for their offense, and the entire thing hinged on what happened next.
The Seahawks took Mississippi State offensive tackle Charles Cross at nine. The New York Jets followed, as Holmes suspected they would, by drafting Ohio State receiver Garrett Wilson at 10. And Holmes felt his heart skip a beat when the New Orleans Saints traded up to 11 with the Washington Commanders.
The Saints, most everyone in the NFL figured, were hoping to add a receiver and offensive tackle, in some order, with their two first-round picks. The top three offensive tackles were off the board, and while a couple formidable receivers remained, Holmes had his heart set on Alabama speedster Jameson Williams.
When the Saints used the 11th pick on Wilson’s Ohio State teammate, receiver Chris Olave, Holmes felt a rush of adrenaline.
“Every team’s situation is different and so I said, ‘maybe (the Saints) won’t (take Williams) because he’s coming off the (knee) injury,’ ” Holmes said. “I’m like trying to talk myself into it. I’m just like, I’m waiting, waiting, so then when I see Olave, I’m just like, ‘God.’ And it just kind of erupted and then that’s when I went and called Kwesi and said, ‘Man, we’re good.’ And he was like, ‘Man, who you picking, man?’ And I told him and he’s like, ‘Man, we got to play against this dude?'”
Engine trouble
Holmes had long craved adding a big-time receiver to the Lions offense, but he wasn’t always sure Williams would be the target.
The second-year Lions GM considered Williams one of the best receivers in the draft back in January, but when Williams tore the anterior cruciate ligament in his left knee in Alabama’s national championship loss to Georgia, he moved into limbo as a prospect.
“This is obviously before free agency, so I kind of had a little bit of — I kind of had him, not at arm’s length, but I kind of put him in a different box amongst all the other guys,” Holmes said. “So I kind of, not put him to the side, but I kind of had him in his own special, unique category of like, very talented player but he’s injured. You’re not going to have him.”
The Lions signed DJ Chark to a one-year deal in free agency and brought back two of their other top pass-catchers from last season, Josh Reynolds and Kalif Raymond. With Amon-Ra St. Brown and Quintez Cephus also returning, Holmes felt good about his receiver room.
There was depth, there was versatility, there was enough to get the Lions to the start of this season, but long-term questions remained.
In early April, Holmes locked himself in his home office and spent a Sunday afternoon watching tape of the top receivers in this year’s draft. When he hit play on Williams’ film, his jaw hit the ground.
“He was the one that I was just like, I was dropping the remote,” Holmes said. “And I’ve seen it before, but I had him in that (special) category. I had to take him out of that category and I had to stack them all together, and I’m just like, ‘This is the guy.'”
Across the NFL, teams cluster players into different categories. There are elite prospects — the best of the best in any draft class, who are expected to develop into perennial Pro Bowlers. “Blue” prospects are difference-makers who should start as rookies and make an immediate impact. And “red” players are a notch below that, players who may have designated roles or need more seasoning.
Holmes thinks of those categories like engines. A V6 is nice, but a V8 is better, and even more powerful than that is a V12. Williams was a V12.
“When I start dropping remotes, that’s when I know,” Holmes said. “You knew about the deep stuff, but when he would start doing the stuff underneath and you watch his kickoff returns and when you start watching him as a gunner, taking gunner reps, and just the fearlessness that he has just as a football player, that’s when it came alive like, ‘Man, this dude’s a dog.’
“That’s hard to find, and then you do so much more research and you’re talking to other coaches that have worked very, very closely with him and the intel that you’re getting from them, you’re just like, ‘OK, this is different.’ Like, ‘This is just a different guy.’ So right there, that’s when I was like, ‘All right, how can we get him?’ And I know we ain’t getting him at 32, so you better go up and get the V12.”
Perfect alignment
Two Sundays before the draft, Holmes decided he wanted to make a run at one of the “multiple” receivers he put in the V12 bucket, with Williams atop his wish list.
The Lions knew they would get a defensive difference-maker with their first pick of the first round (No. 2 overall); Michigan’s Aidan Hutchinson was the eventual choice. And Holmes wanted to see if he could do the same for his offense.
He talked things over with Lions coach Dan Campbell, who was all for the move, told team president Rod Wood and owner Sheila Hamp about his plan, and the week before the draft started making calls to teams in the top 15 to gauge the price of moving up.
The Lions had the No. 32 pick in Round 1 from last year’s Matthew Stafford trade, and No. 34 early in Round 2. Everyone was comfortable packaging those picks at the turn to try and get a receiver, and everyone was comfortable giving Williams time to recover this fall.
Holmes called four teams around No. 12, both before and after the Vikings pick, and all four said they were interested in moving down, with everyone realizing contingencies were attached.
A few days later, Holmes followed up with Adofo-Mensah to finalize the parameters of the deal, and after working the phones the morning of the draft, he called the Vikings’ first-year GM around 3 or 4 p.m. Thursday from the Lions’ Allen Park practice facility.
“It wasn’t set in stone that it was going to happen before the draft,” Holmes said. “I’m sure Kwesi, he had a pool of players that he was looking to see was going to be there, and obviously we had the players that we’re looking to see who’s going to be available. So it’s really cool when it all aligns perfectly like how it did. It doesn’t always work like that, and you have to make contingency plans about not only the player’s availability but teams around Kwesi.”
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Holmes never told Adofo-Mensah the players or positions he was targeting in a move up until the deal was done, and Adofo-Mensah never mentioned any players the Vikings were targeting at 12 who might have scuttled the trade.
Ultimately, the Lions dealt 32, 34 and 66 (the second pick of Round 3), for 12 and 46. They used No. 46th pick on Kentucky defensive lineman Josh Paschal, while the Vikings took Georgia safety Lewis Cine at 32, Oklahoma linebacker Brian Asamoah at 66 and traded 34 to the Green Bay Packers for a pair of picks. Minnesota used one of those picks on LSU offensive lineman Ed Ingram and packaged the other with third- and sixth-round picks to move up and take Clemson cornerback Andrew Booth.
The Lions got the better of the deal according to the popular trade value charts, both the old Jimmy Johnson model (they gave up 1,410 points on that chart, and got back 1,640 points of value in return), and the newer Rich Hill version (337.3 points received, 280.2 points given up).
But Holmes praised Adofo-Mensah for doing “a hell of a job” adding talent to his roster in his first draft as GM and said he understands why the Vikings did a deal that he called “a win-win” for both teams.
“I have so much respect for Kwesi,” Holmes said. “I remember when we first touched base on it, we were both in agreeance of, we’re not into the real archaic like, you better not trade with somebody in your division.
“But he was actually acquiring more starters than we were. So I totally understood the win on his part, so I didn’t understand (why people were critical of the Vikings’ return). I guess on the surface, but Kwesi’s extremely intelligent, very forward thinking, I’m a huge fan of him and I totally understand why he did that trade. For where he’s at as an organization, where his team is at, and they’re in kind of a unique window in my opinion that what they’re looking for, they were able to move back and pick up some more. It looked like they had a nice haul in this draft.”
The Lions had a nice haul, too, and acquiring Williams was a big reason why.
“Sometimes the draft gods smile on you a little bit and everything lines up,” Holmes said. “It lined up with me and Kwesi and our teams to have a partner to make that move, and it worked out and it was a win-win.”
Contact Dave Birkett at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @davebirkett.