Detroit Lions general manager Brad Holmes and head coach Dan Campbell have a plan. It shouldn’t include Jalen Ramsey, unless the Rams’ cornerback can convince his team’s front office to ship him to Detroit for a couple of sixth-round picks and then offer to pay half of his $25 million salary cap hit.
That’s ridiculous, right?
So is tying up that much money on a cornerback who will be 29 the second month of the season and entering, at best, the backside of his prime — cornerbacks have longer shelf lives than running backs, but they lose a step as they round 30.
Ramsey played well toward the back half of the season last year and, according to the numbers, finished with his second-best grade as a pro. Pro Football Focus had him as the NFL’s third-best cover corner in the league.
That his Rams missed the playoffs wasn’t his fault; Matthew Stafford didn’t play in eight games. But you know who graded as the top two cornerbacks? Sauce Gardner and Patrick Surtain II, neither of whom made the playoffs, either.
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Again, it wasn’t their fault. Their teams, the Jets and Broncos respectively, had, uh, some issues, mainly that they couldn’t score.
This isn’t an argument against paying cornerbacks, or against cornerbacks in general: they are critical in balancing a defense and for coaches who hope to force a punt once in a while.
Superstar cornerbacks, however, are not critical.
Of the seven highest-graded CBs in the league, only one played in a conference title game — Charvarius Ward. And while he helped anchor the best defense in football, his team, the San Francisco 49ers, lost to Philadelphia in the NFC championship game because they couldn’t score points, because their starting quarterback got hurt.
Not that I’m advocating the Lions draft a quarterback. A backup? Absolutely, unless they are convinced they can find one in free agency.
Obviously, the Lions need help in the secondary, particularly at cornerback. They just don’t need one who grades out among the very best in the game.
That’s a luxury, one that Kansas City and Philadelphia and Cincinnati didn’t have but found a way to play in the penultimate week of games anyway. What they did have was solid secondary play, sometimes better than solid, especially Philadelphia.
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So, no, the Lions don’t need Jalen Ramsey. Not now. Not as they are this young and still building and not as long as Holmes and Campbell keep showing they can find talent all over the draft.
Maybe at some point a Ramsey-like player will be the missing piece. But not yet. The Lions need to get to the playoffs first. They need to win their division first. They need to show that the 8-2 finish last season wasn’t a one-off, that it was a beginning.
And if it was, then spending that kind of money on a player with maybe one more deep prime year doesn’t make sense.
Thankfully, Campbell seemed to agree Wednesday when asked how he and Holmes would try to improve the roster this off-season.
“Let’s find a guy that can serve a type of role for us,” he told reporters from the NFL combine in Indianapolis. “We don’t need to acquire these, ‘man, you’re paying the most for these guys because they’re rated the number one player in free agency at that position.’ We just need to get better. Let’s just get better in an area we need to get better at and focus on that.”
As I said, he and Holmes have a plan. They want players to fit that plan, they want players who fit their locker room and meeting rooms and practice fields and game huddles.
Ramsey might fit just fine. He just doesn’t fit the timeline. Nor the pocketbook. Another cornerback in free agency might.
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Surely a cornerback in the draft will. It’s a deep draft for corners. None of them may be the lockdown menace Ramsey can be. But the Lions don’t have to have a cornerback who will do that. The proof is in the playoff record.
So, no, the Lions don’t need to give up their first-round picks, unless they are moving them to improve their position for a player they crave or to move them for even more picks. Holmes and Campbell have earned the benefit of the doubt when it comes to the draft.
They’ve also earned a bit of patience. Too many teams get impatient when they start to see a path like the Lions see now. They want to speed it up. They trade away either a piece of the future or flexibility for the future and wind up never getting there.
The Lions may not get there, either. The NFL is fickle like that. A few bad bounces at the end of the game — no one around here has to be told about goal post luck — a few injuries and suddenly the season implodes.
Ramsey won a Super Bowl with the Rams. But he joined a team that already played in a Super Bowl without him, and had made the playoffs, and had traded for a quarterback specifically to get to and win a Super Bowl.
Los Angeles’ front office knew its best players had a tight window and that many of them were near the edge of their primes. Ramsey fit that timeline.
He doesn’t fit the one here.
Contact Shawn Windsor: 313-222-6487 or swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @shawnwindsor.