Current Detroit Lions general manager Brad Holmes nearly scored a job with the franchise two decades ago.
The hiring of general manager Brad Holmes in 2021 may go down as one of the best moves in Detroit Lions franchise history. But nearly 20 years prior to that moment, the Lions had their first crack at Holmes, but didn’t end up landing him.
According to a story told by Holmes himself on the Field Talk Podcast, the Lions general manager was just starting his NFL career in 2003 when he faced a critical decision. His media internship with the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks had given him the connections he needed for the opportunity he really wanted: to be in the NFL. He had job offers from the Detroit Lions and the St. Louis Rams. Here’s how Holmes described what happened next.
“When I had those two opportunities with the Lions and the Rams to be a PR director, I was just reading through all the bios in the media guide, and I saw that the Rams hired a lot of their interns,” Holmes explained. “So that’s when I was like—I actually got the job offer from the Lions first and then the Rams offered me later.
“I kinda had already accepted the Lions one, but when I read through the Lions’ media guide, I didn’t see any bios of like, ‘Oh, former intern, former intern.’ So I was like, ‘Man, this is just going to be another intern one-and-done.’ So when the Rams gave me the opportunity, I had to make the dreaded call (to the Lions) that I was going to go with the Rams.”
The rest is history. Holmes would spend the next 18 years within the Rams organization, working his way up from PR intern to scout to national scout to director of college scouting. The Lions, meanwhile, fumbled their way through three different general managers over that span.
But fate would bring them together at last when Mike Disner, a prominent voice in the Lions’ general manager search in 2020, found a video interview. It was of Holmes’ general manager interview he had recorded at the NFL Combine earlier that year.
If this entire story sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because Holmes himself made a passing reference to it at the very, very beginning of his Detroit Lions introductory press conference back in 2021. Here were his first words of that presser:
“How’s everybody doing? Before my second interview, I hadn’t been to the Allen Park facility since I interviewed here to be a PR intern, actually. This is right before I ended up being a Rams PR intern, so it’s really funny how everything became – really got full circle.”
Still, it’s cool to hear the fuller story from Holmes. And it comes as no surprise that Detroit is now following the path that once drew Holmes to the Rams. In just four years, the Lions have consistently promoted from within, providing pathways to bigger career opportunities. Be it in the coaching, personnel, or even the PR department, the Lions are suddenly becoming a pipeline to bigger success. Who knows, maybe they’ve already hired the next Brad Holmes who chose Detroit over another opportunity.
