Dan Campbell got the draft day jersey treatment. So did Brad Holmes.
This year, it was Rod Wood’s turn.
Campbell, Holmes and the rest of the Detroit Lions draft room wore long-sleeve black T-shirts with an image of Wood, the team’s outgoing president, in a white No. 22 Goodrich High basketball jersey on the front for Day 3 of the NFL Draft on Saturday, April 25.
“Rod’s last draft so we wanted to do something special,” Holmes said. “We were a little nervous about how he was going to react but the high school basketball photo, I thought it was pretty cool so I thought he handled it pretty well, actually. He felt like it was cool. But yeah, Rod’s done so many special things for everybody else, whether it was my jersey last year, Dan’s jersey, so I thought it was really cool to do something cool for him.”
The shirts continue a tradition that Wood said this spring started as a way “to have something that’s fun that goes along with something that’s really intense.”
In 2024, the Lions draft room wore black No. 89 jerseys in honor of Campbell, who helped make black jerseys a part of the team’s uniform again. Campbell wore No. 89 when he played for the Lions in 2006-08.
Last year, the Lions wore yellow No. 95 North Carolina A&T jerseys − the number Holmes wore during his college playing days at the school − a few weeks before Holmes gave the commencement speech at his alma matter.
Wood, who plans to retire sometime after the Lions hire his replacement this summer, played high school basketball at Goodrich, less than an hour north of Detroit.
Wood, who helped coordinate the previous draft-day outfits that honored Campbell and Holmes, said at a pre-draft event with the Detroit Economic Club in mid-April that he didn’t know what the draft room dress code would be for Day 3 this year.
Lions brass also have worn sweatshirts with thinly veiled messages on them during the draft. In 2024, they wore hoodies that read “Positional Villain,” a reference to their early 2023 draft picks at non-premium positions running back, linebacker, tight end and safety. And last year, they wore sweatshirts with a line through “HWS” − scouting shorthand for height, weight and speed − on the front.
“It’s just part of something we started a couple years ago to have something that’s fun that goes along with something that’s really intense,” Wood said. “I’ve described the draft as moments of excitement surrounded by hours of boredom as you’re kind of waiting for your turn to pick and we’ve just kind of made it a thing where we do something that is important for somebody in the room and this year it might be me, I don’t know. We’ll see.”
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: Lions honor outgoing president Rod Wood with draft room T-shirt
Reporting by Dave Birkett, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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