Thursday spelled the end of Ty Johnson’s status on the Detroit Lions active roster. The second-year RB was waived to make room for safety Jayron Kearse, who was activated from the suspended list.
Johnson’s departure is the latest of the near-constant deck shuffling by the Lions at the running back position. It’s been one of Detroit GM Bob Quinn’s biggest follies, and it’s proof Quinn just isn’t learning from his own mistakes.
Johnson is the second running back the Lions have drafted in the last two years to get cut by the team in a little over a month. Fifth-round rookie Jason Huntley, who couldn’t beat out Ty Johnson in the competition between the two declared by Quinn when he drafted Huntley, is now in Philadelphia. He has played one snap all year, gaining one yard in a garbage-time carry.
The third RB Quinn drafted since 2019 is the most glaring example. D’Andre Swift was the No. 35 overall pick in the 2020 NFL Draft. He’s currently the third-string RB, playing just 60 snaps in three weeks. Yet that’s not an indictment of Swift’s talent or potential. Instead, it illustrates how Quinn has botched handling the RB position.
Kerryon Johnson, back healthy after a 2019 season where he missed half the year and didn’t play well when he was on the field, remains above Swift. As he probably should; Johnson was a second-round pick in 2018 and played very well as a rookie.
That’s two second-round picks in three drafts on running backs. Detroit remains a pass-heavy offense with Matthew Stafford at the helm, but Quinn continues to overspend draft capital on running backs.
In 2019, Detroit’s most effective runner was Bo Scarbrough. He was signed off the street thanks to a lengthy injury history and negligible skill in the passing game. Scarbrough is currently injured too, a status that helped lead Quinn to sign Adrian Peterson off the street after training camp ended.
That’s right. A future Hall-of-Fame RB was readily available for anyone to sign the week before the Week 1 kickoff. And Peterson has impressed — he’s still got “it”. He’s the lead back despite being 35 and barely practicing with his new teammates in a different offense.
Backs are always available. Carlos Hyde was still available a month after the draft before joining the Seahawks despite the fact he topped 1,000 rushing yards for the Texans in 2019. Frank Gore signed with the Jets after the draft. as did LeSean McCoy in Tampa Bay. Both were perfectly capable starting RBs in 2019, running for more yards per carry than Kerryon Johnson did. The Browns salvaged a very good player in Kareem Hunt after the Chiefs dumped him for his off-field issues, which is also how Peterson became available a few years back.
The NFL is littered with relative unknown RBs suddenly emerging as good starters. Take Raheem Mostert in San Francisco, a player cut by five different teams in a 12-month span before blowing up when given an opportunity. Austin Ekeler with the Chargers proved a better all-around back as an undrafted free agent than first-rounder Melvin Gordon. Kenyan Drake went from deep reserve on a bad Miami offense to effective starter in Arizona — he’s currently 7th in the league in rushing. This week’s Lions foe, the New Orleans Saints, plucked Vikings discard Latavius Murray off the street and he’s a very effective No. 2 RB…for little more guaranteed money than the Lions are paying Swift.
Detroit added Kerrith Whyte to the practice squad, effectively swapping him in for Jonathan Williams, yet another running back with starting experience plucked off the street over the summer. The Lions see enough in Whyte, who got 24 carries with the Steelers as a rookie, to keep him on the protected practice squad list every week.
This is where Quinn isn’t seeing the err of his own ways. He’s been effective at scouring the waiver wire and free agent market to pick up useful RB talent. But he continues to burn valuable draft capital to try and accomplish the same goal, and it’s not working. It’s a wildly inefficient allocation of draft resources for a team that sorely lacks depth at several more critical positions.
Quinn is guilty at fullback, too. In an offense where the fullback plays between 12 and 20 percent of the offensive snaps and touches the ball about once a month, he burned a 2018 draft pick on Nick Bawden. Nothing against Bawden, though he didn’t play well in 2019, but linebacker Jason Cabinda switched from defense to offense and in less than a month pushed Bawden off the roster.
The dichotomy of Quinn and the Lions being able to find effective RB talent from the outside, but still overspending draft capital for the very same — at best — outcomes makes no sense. Yet that’s exactly what Quinn continues to do, without fail. That’s a big fail for the Lions GM.