It’s not easy having an abundance of talent in the NFL. In the salary cap era, the league has purposely tried to make it hard for one team to hoard all of the talent, even if that team managed to find those players all on their own through the draft. It’s only a matter of time before teams have to make tough decisions on talented players due to the rising costs of an increasingly improved roster.

The Detroit Lions are nearing that time in their development, and general manager Brad Holmes openly admitted this during the NFL Combine last month.

“There are a lot of decisions that we have to make,” Holmes said. “Because we’re at the point, we’re at the juncture with our roster right now that we have identified a lot of young core pieces that we want to keep around and unfortunately that’s the tough part is that you got to make decisions on other players contractually that you might not be able to keep that you want to keep. So it’s not more so due to you don’t want to have the players anymore but you just can’t have everybody.”

We’ve already seen the results of this cap-saving strategy with a modest free agency from the Lions. As of this publishing, the Lions only signed six external free agents, and only one was signed to a multi-year deal.

But that’s only the first stage. At some point, the Lions are going to have to let some talented players walk. Sometimes that will mean via free agency, but that could also mean trading away players to maximize the team’s return on a player they can’t afford to re-sign. We’ve seen some of the best teams in the NFL apply this strategy, whether it be the Kansas City Chiefs with players like Tyreek Hill and Joe Thuney, the 49ers with Deebo Samuel, or the Philadelphia Eagles with C.J. Gardner-Johnson.

In this week’s Midweek Mailbag, we discuss whether the Lions could be the next team in line to trade away some of their talented players in an effort to keep costs low and maximize their draft capital. Are the Lions positioned in a way where they need to do it? Which players could be on the block as soon as the trade deadline this year? And what kind of value are we talking about? Our discussion on that topic begins around the 29:40 mark of this week’s episode.

Other topics on this week’s show (in chronological order):

• Our opinions on the Lions’ three rule proposals
• Debating the arguments for and against extending Jameson Williams
• Which prospects are worth trading up in the first round for?
• Do the Lions need to draft a tall cornerback?
• Can Ennis Rakestraw play on the outside?
• Should the Lions draft a quarterback? Is Jalen Milroe a fit?
• Predicting who starts opposite Aidan Hutchinson on the EDGE
• What’s one thing you hope the coordinators keep from their predecessors? What’s one thing you hope they change?
• Favorite/least favorite wins from 2025