The best defensive player in the NFL got traded to next season’s Super Bowl favorite – a distinction oddsmakers laid on the Los Angeles Rams before they made the move for Myles Garrett.
Now?
Hang up the cleats and padlock the stadium, the season is over for the Detroit Lions. Everyone else in the NFL, too.
Because as anyone who’s watched even a single game of professional football knows in their gut, this game is nothing if not predictable.
But … but what about Sam Darnold?
Didn’t everyone see his Super Bowl win coming when the Seattle Seahawks traded for him last off-season? And before you say all he had to do was not turn it over with that defense, look at what he did in the NFC title game, when he went throw for throw with Matthew Stafford and the Rams.
Oh, you want numbers?
Well, here you go: 25-for-36, 346 yards, three touchdowns. Just because he didn’t throw a pick or fumble doesn’t make a game manager.
Yeah, yeah, Seattle won because they had the best defense in the NFL. Yet they don’t win without Darnold playing the game of his life.
No one saw that game coming, of course, at least not before the season, when the sportsbooks gave Seattle 60-to-1 odds to win the Super Bowl. Buffalo and Baltimore were co-favorites, just ahead of Philadelphia, Kansas City and Green Bay.
The Packers, you may recall, became favorites in sportsbooks after trading for Micah Parsons, the game-wrecking bon vivant who disrupts a football field a lot like … well, Myles Garrett.
But Parsons got hurt and Green Bay lost to Chicago in the wild card round.
Still, Green Bay took the swing, right?
As the Rams just did. As San Francisco did when the 49ers landed running back Christian McCaffrey, and as the Eagles did when they acquired running back Saquon Barkley. Sometimes a massive move leads to a Super Bowl, sometimes it doesn’t – but at least the teams tried, eh?
That was the thinking from metro Detroit’s finest handwringers Monday, June 1, when news of the Rams deal broke. Like, come on, when will the Lions ever take a chance? For that matter, when will any team in Detroit?
And why are this town’s general managers (and/or presidents of baseball/basketball operations – or POBO, for short) always playing it safe?
Lions following Seahawks’ Super Bowl path
It’s too soon, of course, to say this about the Detroit Pistons. In hoops, swinging for a title with huge moves hasn’t led any team to a parade in thepast five years. Patience is helpful in the NBA, particularly when a team stumbles onto a promising young core. (Yes, stumbles. Exhibit: San Antonio.)
The Red Wings and Tigers, meanwhile, have been stubbornly patient in sports where aggressiveness and taking chances pays off more. This is especially true in MLB, where the lack of a salary cap favors the bold – and the rich.
But then that’s an injustice for another time. The Tigers’ owner and POBO knew they needed more right-handed hitting in the winter and did little to get it.
The Lions knew what they needed, too. Mostly a center and serious improvement along the offensive line. Whether they landed those will be answered soon enough. But at least the Lions spent some resources – cap space, draft picks – trying to improve their critical weakness.
Fail to improve the O-line, and the season was going to be a wash. Did it take guts to throw resources at the O-line this offseason? Not really. But if the line looks like it did during the Lions’ 2022-24 peak, and not like it did in 2025, then that will have taken smarts and savvy, and those matter as well.
Rebuilding is easier in the NFL than it is in the NBA or even the NHL or MLB. Mostly because it is easier to scout. That leaves scouting luck as a bigger factor in the other sports, especially in hockey and baseball; lottery luck is critical in basketball.
Health luck is central to NFL success, which brings us back to the Lions, who watched their 15-2 season slip away in the 2024 playoffs after a deluge of injuries gutted the defense. They had injuries last season, too, but nothing like the year before; 2025’s failures were on the talent side, not health.
They had the right kind of injury luck in 2023 and got within four points of a Super Bowl. They might have gotten to that Super Bowl if they’d had a little ball luck, like the kind the Seahawks were gifted when the Rams fumbled a punt return in the NFC title game last season.
The initial part of the Lions rebuild under Brad Holmes and Dan Campbell and the subsequent run to the 2023 NFC title game showed they know how to get painfully close to a Super Bowl without taking a big swing on the trade market: through the draft – aka, the same way the Seahawks got to the Super Bowl in February.
The Rams’ way is far from the only way to win
Which is to say: The Rams’ way – “Eff Them Picks,” as it’s colloquially known – isn’t the only way, nor is it the only way to take a gamble.
Holmes, an ex-Rams exec who now runs the Lions, gambles each time he signs a player to a substantial contract – anything more than $20 million a year. The Lions have eight of those. Each signing came with a varying level of risk.
Yes, these players happened to be playing for the Lions when they signed those big contracts, and yes, not all of those signings look so savvy at the moment. At the time? Safety Kerby Joseph was an All-Pro and Alim McNeill was trending toward becoming a top-10 defensive tackle. Both got hurt.
And Jameson Williams? The big money contract for the young wideout didn’t make quite as much sense at the time. Yet he justified his money on the field last season (though he still needs to take another step – or two).
Holmes and Campbell believed in their own players because those players were playing at All-Pro or Pro Bowl levels. Sticking with them guarantees nothing, obviously. But neither does spending big for outsiders.
The most recent Super Bowl champ began its rebuild similarly to the Lions: by flipping a star quarterback for draft picks from a team looking to make a splash. New CBS broadcaster Russell Wilson didn’t pan out in Denver the way Peyton Manning did six years earlier, or the way Stafford did when the Lions shipped him to Los Angeles. But the Wilson move catapulted the Seahawks forward, like the Stafford move did for the Lions.
One team rode those picks – and some savvy signings – along with the luck of an opposing punt returner who lost his footing, all the way a Super Bowl win. The other team rode its picks to within a few points of a Super Bowl and got unlucky: a rare, botched handoff, a dropped pass, a fluky bounce off a facemask that led to a 51-yard reception.
Maybe it’s harder to win the way Seattle just won, the way the Lions have been trying to win. Maybe the Rams will prove the oddsmakers right and grab the Lombardi Trophy for the second time in six or so years. That would be rare, too, though, considering the preseason favorite wins it all roughly 10-15%of the time – and has done so only three times in the past 30 years.
So as eye-popping as Monday’s trade news was for NFL fans – and as dispiriting as it was for some Lions fans –history suggests we wait … and that Cleveland will be the team to beat in a few years.
Contact Shawn Windsor: swindsor@freepress.com. Follow him @shawnwindsor.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Myles Garrett makes Rams Super Bowl favorite. But don’t ignore Lions
Reporting by Shawn Windsor, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
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