Alim McNeill was a tough-to-tackle running back growing up in North Carolina whose favorite player was Adrian Peterson.
So it made sense when McNeill tore his ACL late in the 2024 season, nearly 13 years to the day Peterson tore his as a running back with the Minnesota Vikings, he figured he’d make a Peterson-like comeback.
Peterson ran for 2,097 yards and won MVP the season after he tore his ACL. He logged the most offensive touches of his soon-to-be Hall of Fame career and had the second most rushing yards in NFL history.
Peterson made recovering from a torn ACL look easy, and it wasn’t until last fall McNeill realized how superhuman he was.
“That’s what I wanted to do,” McNeill told the Free Press last week. “I wanted to come back and I wanted to have an Adrian Peterson-type impact. Two thousand yards and an MVP. It’s just a little different being a D-lineman. You got to take on doubles, you got to do a lot more in that bent-knee position than I ever really was putting into the factor. But I had that mindset and I feel like I had the right mindset, it just wasn’t much I could do about it.”
McNeill returned from his injury last Oct. 20, about 10 months post-surgery, and had an ordinary season for the Detroit Lions.
He played in 10 games, had one sack, made 14 tackles and was on the field for 77% of the defensive snaps in the games he played.
He wasn’t bad, but he wasn’t the difference maker he was used to being and he didn’t play up to his own standard as one of the best defensive tackles in the NFL.
“He would never say anything about it, he never did last year,” Lions coach Dan Campbell said. “But when we went back and watched clip after clip, back to back, to back, to back, to back, to back, of all the season, when you start going through all of these, he was favoring the leg a little bit. I don’t think he even realized it.”
McNeill said he knew he wasn’t 100% in real time.
He didn’t trust his knee on the field, and physically he felt a touch off.
“You can see it right there, but if you can’t get to it, you can’t get to it,” McNeill said. “Now I got two legs and I have no excuse, and I feel wonderful out here now so I really feel like I’m back to me, playing like me, getting off the ball like me, getting off blocks like I usually do.”
McNeill has been one of the Lions’ best and most consistent performers through the first week of training camp.
He blew up back-to-back plays in the Lions’ first run period of practice Tuesday and he’s been a menace to the team’s interior linemen all summer.
“He looks like he’s back to what he was,” Campbell said.
McNeill said he underestimated how much having a full offseason mattered.
Last year, he was forced to spend the spring rehabbing his knee. This spring, he trained for football, dropped weight and reported to camp around 300 pounds.
That’s the same weight McNeill played at in 2023, when he had a breakout five-sack season after moving from nose tackle to three technique. Already, he said he’s noticed a difference in his stamina, explosiveness and focus on the field.
“That was all part of the problem, honestly,” McNeill said. “Cause I couldn’t run for a while. I like literally couldn’t run so I was about – I wasn’t fat, but I was about 312, 315-ish, which is my weight range. [I’m] moving a lot different right now and I feel great.”
If McNeill can approach the impact he had in 2023 and before his injury in 2024, both he and the Lions should benefit this fall.
At his best, McNeill is one of the most disruptive interior pass rushers in the NFL, and his presence should boost a run defense that slipped from fifth to 14th in the league last year.
On a personal level, McNeill heard the speculation this offseason that he could be a cut candidate if he doesn’t have a bounce-back year because the guaranteed money on his contract expires in 2027.
That “adds fuel to the fire,” he said, but “I know I’m going to hoop so they can say what they want.”
“I know what’s on the line,” he said. “You don’t have to tell me twice at all.”
Dave Birkett covers the Lions for the Detroit Free Press. Contact him at dbirkett@freepress.com. Follow him on Bluesky, X and Instagram at @davebirkett.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Healthier, lighter Alim McNeill ready ‘to hoop’ for Lions D-line
Reporting by Dave Birkett, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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By Dave Birkett, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
