2019 NFL Draft: Detroit Lions 7-round 2019 mock draft 1.0

Kicking off a mock draft series taking a look at what the Detroit Lions could do when the 2019 NFL Draft rolls around at the end of the month.

This time last year, the Detroit Lions were undergoing a massive change as Matt Patricia prepared for his first season as a head coach. While this will be the second NFL Draft since his hiring, this will be the first draft in which he enters with a real working knowledge of his roster now that he has a season under his belt. From the outside, some needs are obvious, but we’ll see if Patricia’s more intimate knowledge of the roster leads to some surprises.

Playing out a variety of scenarios has become a pre-draft tradition for me and it’s time to get my annual Lions seven-round mock draft series started. As was the case in previous years, this series will be generated using a mock draft simulator where I am in control of making each Lions pick while picks for the rest of the league will be auto-generated.

To ensure a variety of scenarios are explored prior to the draft, I will run each mock draft using a different big board and change up the player I take with the Lions’ pick in the first round. Because what happens early in the draft can have a big impact on what happens later, we should see each mock draft in this series take on a life of its own.

Let’s get a few things out of the way up front before we get on with the picks. This is not meant to be a prediction of what the Lions will do, nor is it necessarily what I think the Lions should do. This is just a look at what they could do — at least within the parameters of The Draft Network’s mock draft simulator set to run using their predictive board.

Mock drafts are supposed to be fun, so let’s have some fun together.