The Detroit Lions often tell a lot about their NFL Draft intentions by the players they decide to meet. Whether it\u2019s formal meetings at the NFL Combine or pre-draft visits to their team facility in Allen Park, the Lions\u2019 draft history has been littered with players they\u2019ve done additional work on.<\/p>\n
So every year, we like to track which players have had extra contact with the team in order to see if there are any hints as to what the Lions may do during NFL Draft weekend.<\/p>\n
This year, we opted not to track reports on Senior Bowl, Shrine Bowl, or NFL Combine visits. This isn\u2019t because those visits aren\u2019t important\u2014they are\u2014but they\u2019re often reported haphazardly. For example, just about every team meets with every player at the Senior Bowl and Shrine Bowl, so that list wouldn\u2019t be particularly insightful. As for the NFL Combine, we know that formal Detroit Lions meetings are often a good sign of serious interest, but it is not always made abundantly clear from reports\u2014or the players themselves\u2014whether meetings with teams were considered formal (with the team in a private setting) or informal (in passing or one-on-one with a specific coach). Formal meetings carry weight. Informal ones, not as much.<\/p>\n
Another thing muddying the waters this year is that the Lions did not hold a \u201clocal pro day,\u201c during which they test and meet prospects from the local Michigan area. Lions general manager Brad Holmes explained the decision earlier this week.<\/p>\n
\u201cJust internally we kind of made a decision to utilize that time for some other things, but still utilize the local visits as well,\u201d Holmes said. \u201cWe still utilize the local visits, but we just made the decision really last summer to do away with the pro day.\u201d<\/p>\n
So with that, we\u2019re only left with the reported pre-draft visits to the Lions\u2019 Allen Park facility, and, admittedly, there aren\u2019t a lot of them so far. The Lions appear to be keeping things quite private this year.<\/p>\n
But if you are unfamiliar with the pre-draft visit process, here\u2019s a quick explainer. Teams can host 30 prospects for these pre-draft visits, where testing, interviewing, and film breakdown happen. But players in each team\u2019s local area do not count against that 30-player limit. Because those visits are basically identical from the players\u2019 standpoint, we\u2019ve combined them all in the list below.<\/p>\n
Without further ado, here is the list of pre-draft visits that have been publicly reported so far:<\/p>\n
Pre-draft visit tracker (includes top-30 and local visits)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Detroit Lions often tell a lot about their NFL Draft intentions by the players they decide to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":608591,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[559],"tags":[64,63,295909,134976,593,85],"class_list":["post-608590","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nfl","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-detroit-lions-draft","tag-detroit-lions-news","tag-nfl","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608590","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=608590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/608590\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/608591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=608590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=608590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=608590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}