Phoenix — After the seasons the Detroit Lions had in 2023 and 2024, one would have thought president and CEO Rod Wood would be going out on– a high note in a 2026 retirement, even after the team failed to meet expectations in their most recent season.
It was, after all, still a winning season — their fourth in a row, a first for the franchise since 1969-72 — and Wood did, after all, help lead the search that landed coach Dan Campbell and general manager Brad Holmes, the two men who’ve led Detroit to its most prosperous four-year stretch in the Super Bowl era.
Wood, 65, also kept the team’s home base in Allen Park and spearheaded several renovations in recent years, both at Ford Field and the headquarters, to dramatically improve fan and player experiences. He was part of a group effort to bring the 2024 NFL Draft to Detroit, which set an attendance record and further embedded the Lions in the community. He oversaw a uniform redesign during the 2024 offseason that restored the team’s classic look. (While the 2017 redesign wasn’t perfect, it did finally do away with black trim, which was a win at the time.)
With some caveats that the team needs to get back on track after the 9-8 finish, Wood’s final months as Lions president and CEO could have been a celebration of how he generally flipped his approval rating upside down over his final years.
But no.
Wood is going out of the football world in the same way that he came in: by taking immense heat from a fanbase that is genuinely perplexed about why he feels the need to say the things he does.
Not worried about the optics
The Lions’ forcing their franchise’s biggest stars to return portions of their signing bonuses after retirement is not a philosophy that arrived with Wood, who was appointed team president in November 2015. It goes way back to Hall of Fame running back Barry Sanders, who retired in 1999, when Wood was in his first year as vice president of wealth management at Wilmington Trust Company.
But Wood is currently the man tasked with explaining that philosophy, and as he’s done frequently in his tenure with the Lions, did so a bit callously when talking about former All-Pro center Frank Ragnow, who was forced to pay back a “portion” of his signing bonus, according to the Detroit Free Press, despite suffering a grade 3 hamstring sprain — that’s the one where the muscle tears completely — while attempting to come out of retirement midseason.
“I think the reality is, they’re not paying back their money, they’re returning our money,” Wood said. “Cause they were paid in advance for services they hadn’t completed.”
Detroit spent years trying to patch its relationships with Sanders and wide receiver Calvin Johnson after they were forced to pay back signing bonuses following their retirements. The problem isn’t just that the Lions failed to learn from past mistakes. It’s that they did so after we’d grown to expect more from them. The mending of their relationship with Johnson and Sanders seemed like a turning point. It was not.
And again, here’s the thing: That’s not Wood’s fault. The blame primarily falls on the shoulders of the Ford family and owner Sheila Hamp, the chief decision-maker who has had Wood serve as her de facto media representative at the annual league meetings. After vowing to be more accessible with the media when taking on the role, Hamp has not spoken to the media since Detroit traded tight end T.J. Hockenson at the 2022 trade deadline.
So, there was Wood, in his final league meetings press conference, being forced to answer for a situation that many from the outside view as petty, and doing so in a way that enraged the fanbase, as his explanations have done so many times before. He was being a good soldier for an owner that’s enjoyed an immense turnaround in public perception, perhaps by nature of not having to explain some of the unpopular decisions the team has made in recent years.
Just last offseason, after the Lions had increased ticket prices by a range of 23% to 69%, Wood said the “biggest complaints” he received were from season-ticket holders “who we identified as really being brokers.”
“The biggest complaints I got were the people who had their tickets taken away from them because they now can’t resell them and make money,” Wood said.
If he genuinely believed that, he simply wasn’t looking for feedback in the right places. Many longtime season-ticket holders have expressed fear of being priced out following the team’s recent run of success and the associated rise in costs. And while these explanations will never go over all that well, Wood has seemed to pass on most opportunities to express empathy in complicated situations involving fans and players, just like he did when discussing the Ragnow business.
“If I worried about optics, I wouldn’t do a lot of things,” he said.
Wood is no stranger to receiving blowback after firing from the hip in media sessions. It would have been one thing if the comments about his qualifications early on in his tenure had stopped at not being “a football guy.” It was the fact that he also noted that he’s “probably … not qualified to run any other NFL team, but I would say I’m qualified to run this one,” that immediately put a target on his back.
But despite the fanbase’s general feelings about him, it can easily be argued that Wood ran the Lions quite effectively and that the second half of his tenure was a rousing success. In addition to all of the benchmarks previously mentioned, the team’s future is more stable than it has been in decades, even after the last-place finish.
“Winning the division back-to-back, that Los Angeles Rams playoff game environment and the euphoria of winning a home playoff game was great,” Wood said, recounting the best moments of his tenure. “I think taking a chance on Dan and Brad and hiring two guys that had never done the job before, never worked together, but believing that we had the right people for Detroit, that’s a big high.”
It didn’t start out that way. Wood was also involved in the search that landed the Lions general manager Bob Quinn early in his tenure (2016), and later, head coach Matt Patricia (2018). The disastrous pairing reversed all the slightly positive momentum built up by a minor run of success during the mid-2010s.
Patricia’s tenure began with the revelation, reported by The Detroit News, that he was indicted, but not convicted, on sexual assault charges in 1996, a fact that Detroit’s front office failed to uncover during their background check. It finished with Patricia getting fired after another brutal Thanksgiving Day loss as Hamp looked on, hands in face. He finished his 43-game stint with a record of 13-29-1.
Given how spectacularly that regime failed, it seems like a borderline miracle that Wood, along with Hamp, was able to rebound so well with Holmes and Campbell.
“Some of the lows, early years, we struggled,” Wood said. “We didn’t get things figured out as soon as I would have liked to.”
‘Ready for a transition’
When the Lions announce their next team president, there’s a good chance that he has a resume similar to Wood’s, who left Wilmington in 2007 to become the president and CEO of Ford Estates. In other words, there’s a good chance that the next president is “not a football guy.” Given the infrastructure currently in place, that proposition is a lot less concerning than it seemed when Wood joined the Lions.
Wood will stay on through the appointment of a new team president, a search that he’ll be heavily involved in. The team hired an outside firm, Russell Reynolds, to help identify external candidates, and hopes to start interviewing internal and external candidates “in earnest” sometime this month.
Wood said Hamp, special assistant to the president/CEO Chris Spielman, owner/vice chair Bill Ford, and chief people and diversity officer Lindsay Verstegen will all be part of the search before giving Holmes and Campbell the opportunity to voice their opinions toward the end of the process.
“In terms of what I’m looking for is the best person to lead the Lions: Ideally, somebody who has the right kind of executive presence and leadership skills,” Wood said. “Some COO or CEO experience running a big organization. Doesn’t necessarily have to be somebody with football experience. But that would be an advantage if it works out. And, we’ve got a lot of really interesting people that have raised their hands, so we’ll see where it goes.”
Wood is retiring a year later than he had hoped. In his greatest fantasies, he’d be calling it quits after a Super Bowl parade. He thought last year, when the Lions went 15-2 and earned the NFC’s No. 1 seed, was going to be the year.
“That didn’t work out, so I said, ‘Let’s come back and try it one more time,’” he said.
But it’s now time to call it quits. Wood will turn 66 this summer and wants “time to focus on the rest of whatever I have with my family and friends.” He’ll move to Palm Beach, Florida, full-time and hopes to see his kids and grandkids more frequently. He still plans to attend all Lions home games, and potentially some on the road.
He’ll miss the incomparable euphoria of being on the team plane and in the locker room after a big win. He’ll miss the Saturday night dinners where the whole team is together. He’ll miss the people he works with, especially Campbell and Holmes. He’ll be a Lions fan for life and has already lobbied for a Super Bowl ring if the team gets it done in the near future.
“I think the organization is ready for a transition,” Wood added. “Got good leadership in place, a really good football team in place, and it seems like the right time to hand in the baton.”
Frankly, he’ll miss it all. Except for one thing.
“Meeting with you guys,” he told with the press corps in Phoenix this week.
We can’t imagine why.
nbianchi@detroitnews.com
@nolanbianchi
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Rod Wood ending Lions’ tenure the same way he started — in controversy
Reporting by Nolan Bianchi, The Detroit News / The Detroit News
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
