Pride of Detroit
More teams continue to roll out their behind-the-scenes videos from the 2026 NFL Draft, and the most recent one has a lot to do with the Detroit Lions.
The Carolina Panthers’ video—entitled “Panthers Blueprint”—follows their journey to selecting Monroe Freeling with the 19th overall pick. As they waited for the board to fall, the Detroit Lions were a pivot point in the draft. Knowing that the Lions, too, were in the market for an offensive tackle, there was certainly a feeling that Freeling may not be available.
But perhaps what’s most interesting about the video is that they never seem to mention Blake Miller—the Lions’ actual choice—as someone they were interested in.
The Panthers clearly took an analytics-forward approach to their draft. Several times throughout the war room video, vice president of football analytics Eric Eager talks about the probability of certain players being available with their pick.
“Freeling, (Xavier) Proctor is at 70%, one or the other,” Eager says at one point.
“If you go by offensive tackles’ likelihood of making it to our pick: (Spencer) Fano 12%, Proctor 37%, Freeling 53%, (Caleb) Lomu 70%,” Eager adds.
No mention of Miller at all. Later, he list off another group of players and their probabilities: the only two tackles mentioned were Proctor and Freeling.
“Now the two tackles are around a coin flip,” Eager says.
As a few tackles went off the board—Fano at 9, Francis Mauigoa at 10, Proctor at 12—we see the Panthers try to anticipate what the Lions are do. As the video is framed—and remember that these are team-produced videos that may use some editing techniques to make them look good—it appears they are hoping Freeling falls to them.
At one point, they actually discuss trading up with the Lions to ensure they get Freeling, talking internally about using a fifth-round pick to get their guy. When Detroit is finally on the clock, they actually call Lions chief operator officer Mike Disner to see if they’d be willing to trade down, but the Lions said they were standing pat.
“They were doing the same thing we would’ve done and that we were planning on doing anyways,” executive VP of football operations Brandon Tilis said.“ Which is: we’re not taking calls on this pick unless you’re willing to do something dumb, and we weren’t willing to do anything dumb.”
And so we see the reaction to the Panthers war room when Detroit opts to take Miller over Freeling.
“Are they really?”
Then a shared fist bump, and the rest is history. The Vikings take defensive end Caleb Banks, and the Panthers get Freeling at 19.
“They got the guy who they really wanted. They’re really excited about him. And we were pretty fired up when we thought there was a high likelihood that Monroe would be there,” Tilis said.
A few things to keep in mind here. One is selective editing. While I find it hard to believe the Panthers would’ve preferred Miller over Freeling given everything...
