Best moves of the Detroit Lions offseason: Moving on from Tahir Whitehead

Tahir Whitehead was a solid if unspectacular part of the Lions 2017 defense. The team still made the right move in letting him go.

Bob Quinn did not double down on bad investments in 2018. There were several gambles that the Lions had taken in the last few seasons that did not pan out. There are few if any former Lions that I will miss on Sundays. Paul Worrilow was not very good. D.J. Hayden did not live up to his draft status to any greater degree in his second stop around the league than his first. Haloti Ngata is a shell of his former self, and he was a bad fit from day one. Akeem Spence was a terrible scheme fit for the new defensive coaching staff. I could continue the list, but I’m not trying to recap the entire offseason.

Last year, Jarrad Davis struggled to move into a full-time role as the Lions middle linebacker. As a coach, there are three things that you can do when a player is struggling. The first is to find out what the problem is and move heaven and earth to get it fixed. The second is to change what you’re doing to put the player in a position to succeed. The third is to replace him. The Lions replaced Davis with Tahir Whitehead, and they moved Davis to a significantly reduced role.

That was a bad move for the long-term prospects of the team. The coaches likely knew that their best chance to keep their jobs was to make firing them look stupid. They had an inherent reason to take care of the short term above all else. They moved Whitehead back to the middle linebacker position within the defense. The Teryl Austin gave Davis’s nickel package snaps to Paul Worrilow, and later Jalen Reeves-Maybin. They short-circuited the development of a player that the Lions desperately need to develop quickly. The entire defense runs through the middle linebacker, and Davis will be that guy for the next few seasons at the very least. The Lions need him to figure it out, and live snaps in games will be the best way to do that.

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Whitehead found a new home in Oakland. He got a nice big check. It all worked out very well for him. He was a slightly better player than Jarrad Davis in 2017. Getting that mediocre but consistent option out of the way was addition by subtraction. It is not that Whitehead is not a useful player to a team, it’s that he was useful enough to take snaps away from players that need them for development. Davis might be a superstar. Whitehead lacks that upside.