Lions cornerback Terrion Arnold’s name has surfaced in a robbery and kidnapping investigation. Arnold’s lawyer says Arnold was not involved. The Lions believe that.
Lions head coach Dan Campbell and President Rod Wood both said this week that they expect to have Arnold on the field this season and that they accept his claim that he wasn’t involved in the case, which started with Arnold reporting that he’d had property stolen.
“We got all the information that says he wasn’t involved. That’s what we know, that’s all we know, and that’s really all I can say,” Campbell said. “As far as I know it’s not a big deal. It seems like he still wasn’t involved with this.”
Wood told the Detroit Free Press that Arnold “was in my office the day after the allegations came out” and was “grilled” about what happened.
Arnold was the Lions’ first-round draft pick in 2024. He has played 24 games with 22 starts in his first two NFL seasons.
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Offseason programs will start getting underway around the NFL next week.
The ten teams that hired new coaches this offseason will be eligible to start working with their players on Monday, April 6. The Ravens are the only team that has set that as their first day of work while the Cardinals, Falcons, Bills, Browns, Raiders, Dolphins, Giants, Steelers and Titans have set Tuesday as their opening day.
All of those teams will also be able to hold a voluntary minicamp later in the spring. Every team is also scheduled to hold a rookie minicamp and a mandatory minicamp over the course of the next few months.
The first two weeks of work for all teams is limited to meetings, strength and conditioning, and physical rehabilitation only. The three-week second phase allows for on-field work, but no full-speed team drills while the third OTA phase allows for team drills, but there is no live contact allowed at any point in the offseason.
Most of the 22 teams with returning coaches will be opening their offseason programs on April 20 or 21. The Broncos have set May 4 as their first day.
Lions running back Jahmyr Gibbs is the betting favorite to be the NFL’s Offensive Player of the Year, and from Lions coach Dan Campbell’s comments, that sounds like a safe bet.
Gibbs is already one of the NFL’s top running backs, but Campbell said the Lions have even bigger plans for what Gibbs can do in their offense, including lining up at wide receiver.
“Gibbs, we didn’t view Gibbs as a runner, he was a weapon,” Campbell said. “We felt like Gibbs, this guy is gonna explode. Yes, he’s a runner, he can run all schemes, he can run inside, outside, the perimeters, but he also can be lethal out of the backfield, and we’re not even there yet. We feel like this guy can play some receiver. He’s dynamic and he’s a difference-maker. They don’t come around often.”
When the Lions took Gibbs with the 12th overall pick in the 2023 NFL draft, some thought he was a reach. Campbell did not.
“We’d have taken him earlier. We would have taken him earlier,” Campbell said.
The Lions took a step backward in 2025, and head coach Dan Campbell thinks getting into Super Bowl contention in 2026 might be more about attitude than talent.
Campbell said the Lions will bring in more young players this season, and he wants those players to be the kinds of guys who spice things up with their effort. He said the kinds of players he envisions adding to the team will have the same character as the players they added when he was building up the roster early in his tenure in Detroit.
“Everybody wants talent, I’ll always want talent, but it’s always nice to have a little bit of saltiness to you over the talent that lacks saltiness because that’s what we were in ’22, and a part of ’23,” Campbell said. “We had talent, but we had some salty guys and we were highly competitive. We were willing to make it work, figure it out, so just getting a little bit of that edge back. Some of that comes with youth. Now, with youth, you’re gonna have some of the stuff that gets frustrating, the mental [mistakes], but we believe we can get them there as a staff and with the rest of the players we have around them.”
The Lions went 9-8 last year, which before Campbell arrived was considered a good season in Detroit. Campbell has raised the standard to where 9-8 was a disappointment. He wants his team to be better in 2026, and he thinks the team can get better with players who are saltier.
The Titans are adding another quarterback to their roster.
Per Jeremy Fowler of ESPN, Hendon Hooker has agreed to sign with Tennessee.
Hooker, a third-round pick in the 2023 draft, was most recently with the Jets. He had signed with the team’s practice squad late in the 2025 season and was promoted to the 53-man roster in January.
The Lions had waived Hooker in August while reducing their roster to 53 players and he signed with the Panthers’ practice squad a couple of days later.
Hooker has appeared in just three regular-season games, all in the 2024 season with Detroit. He’s completed 6-of-9 passes for 62 yards.
With the addition of Hooker, the Titans will have five quarterbacks on their offseason roster with Mitchell Trubisky, Brandon Allen, and Will Levis all behind 2025 No. 1 overall pick Cam Ward. It stands to reason that at least one will be moved in the coming weeks, with Levis being a prime candidate after recovering from a shoulder injury that kept him out for all of last season.
The Ford family, which has owned the Lions for more than 60 years, has no plans to sell a stake in the team. At least not yet.
Lions President Rod Wood told the Detroit Free Press that private equity firms and other investors “regularly” reach out, but Martha Firestone Ford, the Lions’ 100-year-old owner, isn’t going to sell.
“Right now there’s no immediate desire or need,” Wood said. “They’re aware of what’s out here in the market, they’re aware of what the market values are. Mrs. Ford, still around, she still has a big stake in the team. At her passing, some of this I’m sure will get revisited but right now there’s no urgency. I mean, there’s a lot of people that reach out that would love to invest.”
Martha Firestone Ford’s daughter, Sheila Ford Hamp, now serves as principal owner. Wood said the Lions have heard from “every private equity firm.” At some point, perhaps the Lions will sell a stake. But that’s not where the Fords’ focus is now.
The Lions had added some depth to their secondary.
Detroit announced on Tuesday that the club has signed safety Chuck Clark.
Clark, who turns 31 in April, spent last season with the Steelers. He appeared in 15 contests with five starts, playing 44 percent of defensive snaps and 48 percent of special teams snaps in games played.
Clark previously played the 2024 season with the Jets, starting 12 games. While he missed the 2023 season with a torn ACL, Clark played his first six seasons with the Ravens, starting 63 games for the club.
In 123 career appearances with 80 starts, Clark has registered five interceptions, 37 passes defensed, seven forced fumbles, and 4.5 sacks.
When Lions center Frank Ragnow retired last year, he had to pay the Lions to leave.
Lions President Rod Wood confirmed that the Lions required Ragnow to pay back a portion of his signing bonus, which NFL teams are permitted to do when a player retires with seasons remaining on his contract. Wood said that’s what the Lions always do when a player under contract chooses to walk away.
“Our precedent goes all the way back to Barry Sanders,” Wood told the Detroit Free Press. “And if Barry Sanders paid back money. . . . And I think the reality is, they’re not paying back their money, they’re returning our money. ‘Cause they were paid in advance for services that they hadn’t completed.”
Both Sanders and Calvin Johnson, arguably the two greatest players in Lions franchise history, were required by the team to pay back bonus money when they retired. In both cases, that caused friction between the franchise and the Hall of Famers, but Wood insists it’s good business and only fair for a player to pay back the money for services he didn’t render.
“If we signed, let’s use [Jahmyr] Gibbs. We sign Gibbs to a contract tomorrow and we give him a $20 million signing bonus and he retires on Friday, are we entitled to the $20 million back?” Wood said.
Wood wouldn’t say how much Ragnow paid back, but based on his $6 million signing bonus and the two years remaining on his four-year contract at the time of his retirement, he owed the Lions $3 million. It’s unclear whether that money factored into Ragnow’s attempt to come out of retirement last year, an attempt that was aborted when he failed his physical.
In Wood’s view, the Lions are absolutely justified in taking back the money they’re contractually entitled to.
“It’s the Lions’ money,” Wood said. “It’s not the player’s money.”
The Lions have not made any official pronouncements about their plans for left tackle in the wake of Taylor Decker’s release, but head coach Dan Campbell knows what direction he’d like to go at the position.
Penei Sewell played left tackle in college before moving to the right side upon joining the Lions as a 2021 first-round pick. Speculation about a move back to the left side began to swirl when Decker was considering retirement and has not abated since Decker’s departure.
On Monday, Campbell told reporters at the league meeting in Arizona that his preference is for Sewell to move and that Sewell is prepared for a change.
“He’s ready to do that,” Campbell said, via Albert Breer of SI.com.
Campbell said nothing has been set in stone yet, but it appears to be a safe bet that Sewell will be on Jared Goff’s blindside come the fall.
Wide receiver Kalif Raymond’s choice about where to play in 2026 came down to a pair of familiar options.
Raymond fielded offers from teams like the Seahawks and 49ers in free agency this month, but he whittled his choices down to a pair of NFC North teams. There was a chance to return to the Lions for a sixth season and an opportunity to rejoin a former coach in Chicago. Raymond opted for the chance to play for Bears head coach Ben Johnson, who had been the offensive coordinator in Detroit before leaving for their divisional rivals in 2025.
“I wanted to play in Ben’s offense,” Raymond said, via Dan Pompei of TheAthletic.com. “He’s extraordinarily creative, and honestly, you can be in any spot on the offense, and he will find a way to get you the ball. Just to be under him is a great privilege.”
Johnson said he likes Raymond as a veteran presence in a receiving corps topped by young players Rome Odunze and Lester Burden. He also thinks the wideout is “capable of a bigger role in our offense than what he had” with the Lions last season, so the choice to move to a new city could result in a higher profile along with a change in uniform.
