Peter Schrager’s Lions Mock Has Us Trading Up for Alabama’s Kadyn Proctor
ESPN’s Peter Schrager just dropped his final 2026 mock draft, and Lions fans, you might want to sit down for this one. The guy who supposedly has his finger on the pulse of the NFL has Brad Holmes making the kind of aggressive trade that would have us all reaching for our Honolulu Blue antacids.
Here’s what Schrager thinks goes down: Lions send pick 17, pick 118 (fourth round), AND a 2027 second-round pick to the Rams for pick 13. All so we can grab Alabama left tackle Kadyn Proctor before someone else does.
Look, I get it. Holmes has shown he’s not afraid to get aggressive when he wants his guy. But this feels like panic mode, and frankly, it’s the kind of move that has me flashing back to darker times in Allen Park when we were mortgaging the future for immediate needs.
The Proctor Problem
Don’t misunderstand me here. Proctor is a mountain of a man at 350 pounds who moves better than he has any right to. The kid would be an absolute mauler in our run game, the kind of road grader that helped us earn that No. 1 seed in the NFC in 2024.
But he’s got issues. Pass protection lapses that make you wince. Some whispers about culture fit that should give any Lions fan pause after what we’ve been through. And yes, I know what you’re thinking: we’ve heard these Daniel Jeremiah rumors that the Lions are “infatuated” with Proctor and that he “will not get by Detroit.
Here’s my problem with this whole scenario: in Schrager’s mock, Blake Miller from Clemson goes at 19. Monroe Freeling from Georgia at 21. Max Iheanachor from Arizona State at 23. Caleb Lomu from Utah at 27.
The Math Doesn’t Add Up
Is Proctor really so much better than these other tackles that we should surrender a fourth-round pick AND a future second? That future second could be a starter for four years at minimum salary while our cap situation gets tighter and tighter.
This feels desperate. Hell, it feels like the old Lions making moves out of fear instead of strategy. We’ve got teams reportedly calling around to jump ahead of us for tackles, sure, but that doesn’t mean we panic and overpay.
The silver lining? Schrager has been consistently wrong about what Holmes actually does. Our own Erik Schlitt laid out the track record: Will Johnson, Zach Frazier, Devon Witherspoon, Aidan Hutchinson. The guy throws darts at a board when it comes to predicting Lions moves.
But if this actually happens on draft night, if Holmes really burns this much capital to move up four spots when multiple quality tackles are still available, I’ll be questioning whether we’ve learned anything from our years of draft day disasters.
Are we really about to trade away our future for a tackle with question marks, or is this just another mock draft fever dream? Let me know if you think Holmes pulls the trigger on this kind of move.
I actually think Holmes is way smarter than these mock draft guys give him credit for. He’s been nailing picks while everyone’s been wrong about what he does. If Brad thinks Proctor is his guy, I’m trusting the process here. The talent is there, and we can still find value elsewhere on the board.
This is exactly the kind of move that keeps me up at night as a Lions fan. We’ve been down this road before where we overpay trying to fill a hole instead of being patient. There’s too much talent in the middle rounds to mortgage our future like that, especially when other tackles are sitting right there.
You know, I’ve seen this franchise make all kinds of desperate moves over the years, and it never ends well. The moment you start trading away future picks out of fear instead of waiting for your guy to fall, that’s when things go sideways. We should be better than that by now.