Five likely winners and five likely losers at Detroit Lions training camp

Football is a team sport. That, however, is not until week one. For now, the Detroit Lions are jockeying for position; competing to see who has a job, and who doesn’t.

Detroit Lions training camp is about to begin for veteran players. Soon we will be talking about actual events. There will be no more predictions, no more speculation. Things will be happening. We are two weeks and one day from the first preseason game.

That is when most of us will get our first good look at the team. There are open training camp days, but the reports that filter in from those are typically tinted by the rose-colored glasses of a fanbase that has not seen a football game since early February.

It is a concept as old as humanity: what goes up must come down. For every reaction, there is an equal and opposite reaction. What goes around comes around. O.K. I will stop.

Cliche though it might be, it is an indisputable fact that for every player who raises their profile another player’s standing within the roster drops. There are a finite number of roster spots, and nearly double that number of applicants.

These are not all bubble players, just groupings whose position on the depth chart is very likely about to swap. These are the players who play the same position and the one that used to take the field is very likely going to spend time watching the new guy before the first pre-season game hits.

These are the battles I think we will see play out over the course of the preseason. One player moves up the depth chart, and the other moved down, In some cases the second player might even move off the roster entirely.