I’m just going to come out and say it. As a sports writer, I hate this time of year. I love watching the Super Bowl, including the halftime show, the commercials, and everything else. What I despise is that suddenly everything about this game needs to be compared to what the Detroit Lions are doing, and every player who has a good game that night is suddenly the only free agent who matters to a good amount of Lions fans.

Last year, it was that the Lions’ defensive line needs to emulate the Eagles’. I get it, the Eagles got after Patrick Mahomes in that game; it was a good night for them. But their line really wasn’t that good in 2024. The Lions finished the season fourth in pressures with 242. The Eagles finished 25th with 193. The Eagles had 41 sacks, and the Lions have 37. We’re talking four fewer sacks here. In 2025, the Lions were sixth in pressures and fourth in sacks. The Eagles were 11th in pressures and 13th in sacks.

The new thing is that the Lions need to spend a bunch of money because that’s how the Super Bowl-winning teams do it. That’s just not true.

Spending a ton of money is not how the Lions win the Super Bowl

I’ve got to give some real props to Al Karsten from Pride of Detroit for the inspiration on this one. He found that in the past three years combined, the Lions have spent the 22nd most in total guarantees on free agents with $134 million.

You might look at that and think it’s not nearly enough, but consider this. The Eagles, who won last year’s Super Bowl and who a large number of Lions fans say Brad Holmes needed to be more like, are sitting at 20th on that list. They haven’t spent much more than the Lions have in free agency. Which is what I’ve been trying to explain to everyone. Eagles GM Howie Roseman does the draft and retain strategy just like Holmes does, but he hasn’t had one-third of the injuries that Holmes has had to deal with.

Ok, the Eagles are just one example. Surely the Chiefs, who won the two Super Bowls before that, are near the top in spending. They’re not. They’re at the 18th spot. The 49ers, the team that beat the Lions in 2023 to get to the Super Bowl, are 21st.

Ok, here’s where the people making the argument might feel like they’re going to get some proof with this argument. The Patriots are number one with a bullet on this list. The Seahawks are 10th. That’s pretty notable. End of story, right? The Lions need to go spend a ton of money now. Wrong. The reason those teams were able to do that is that they had way cheaper quarterbacks than everyone else.

Drake Maye is playing on a rookie deal, and Sam Darnold is the 18th most expensive quarterback in the league. When you’re not investing a ton of money in your quarterback, it opens the door for you to spend that money everywhere else.

So you might say, “Why don’t the Lions get rid of Jared Goff and draft a quarterback and do it the way the Pats are?” Well, the thing about that is you have to actually find the good quarterback. If you’ve paid attention to the last 10 drafts, that’s pretty hard to do. The Patriots got lucky with Maye, and everything around him just happened to work out as well. Take a look at the rest of the teams in the top 10.

So again, you see a similar thing to what I was talking about with the Patriots. The Bears and Broncos are doing a similar thing. But look at the Vikings, Falcons, and Saints. Look what happens when you don’t get the right quarterback. It’s a risk that blows up in your face. There’s also a time limit on this thing. Soon, the Patriots will have to pay Maye, the Bears will have to pay Caleb Williams, and so on and so forth. Then they’re in the same boat as everyone else.

With all of this said, the Lions do need to be much more active and intentional in free agency this year, and they should have a lot of capital to use. They don’t need to walk into free agency and spend all of it, and they don’t need to be the number one spender. But they do need to spend more than they did last year. We’ll see what happens in March.