Lions GM Brad Holmes and Browns GM Andrew Berry have made it clear that a Myles Garrett trade to Detroit is highly unlikely.
While I doubt this will be the end of the discussion amongst fans and media, Cleveland Browns general manager Andrew Berry and Detroit Lions general manager Brad Holmes pretty much squashed any chance of Myles Garrett becoming a Lion in 2025.
Despite Garrett’s public plea to be traded from the Browns, Berry insisted the team has no intention of trading the 2023 Defensive Player of the Year.
“Our stance really has not changed,” Berry said during his NFL Combine presser. “We can’t imagine a situation where not having Myles as a part of this organization is best for the Browns.”
Obviously, Holmes can’t publicly speak on Garrett—a player who is under contract with a different team. But a few minutes after Berry, Holmes faced a lot of questions about the possibility of adding another edge rusher.
Holmes has experience adding a pass rusher via a trade. Back in October after Aidan Hutchinson suffered his season-ending injury, the Lions exchanged a third-round pick for Browns defensive end Za’Darius Smith—Garrett’s teammate. What he learned during that process may sound obvious to most, but it bears repeating: most teams aren’t willing to give up their best pass rushers, given how coveted the position is.
“There are not a lot of those guys available,” Holmes said. “You can always say, so we lost a star edge rusher due to injury, right? Well, just because you lose a star pass rusher, there’s not but so many in the league anyway. Just because we lost a star pass rusher due to injury, that doesn’t mean that other teams are going to say, ‘Hey, we have a star pass rusher. I know that you lost one, but we have one. Would you like to have this one?’ No, that’s a star pass rusher for that team and they’re trying to win games.”
It’s not that the Lions don’t want another pass rusher. Holmes even said they’d love to have two or three premier pass rushers on the team—as would every team.
“Would we want to have another one? Yes. But we’d like to have three or four high-end rushers,” Holmes said. “But that’s just not always the reality of what you’re able to do. It’s definitely not being ignored.”
Part of the issue is that the team is already in the process of earmarking money for the premier pass rusher they already have: Aidan Hutchinson. The Lions’ 2022 first-round pick is entering the final year of his rookie deal, although the Lions do have the ability to exercise his 2026 fifth-year option to extend his rookie contract another year.
“Those guys are hard to acquire, and it’s hard to keep them, financially. Again, we have one that’s due for an extension and we’ve already kind of gotten to the planning stages about him already,” Holmes said. “When you talk about adding another one, it’s, can you financially add another one? Because you want to add the other one on top of everything else that you have and that makes it tough.”
So does Holmes think, given the price, they could add another premier pass rusher?
“Probably not.”
Well, that’s that.