Pro Football History.com Blog

May 5th, 2025

There was a lot of interest when the Detroit Lions moved up from the 102nd pick to number 70 in the third round of the 2025 NFL Draft. Because of the high cost, some fans and observers were taken aback by the team's choice to trade with the Jacksonville Jaguars in order to acquire wide receiver Isaac TeSlaa. Brad Holmes, the general manager, however, saw the decision as both personal and strategic.

Holmes discussed which player from the Lions' draft haul most caught his attention during an interview with Heather on Detroit's 97.1 The Ticket with Costa and Jansen. He expressed confidence in each of the seven choices, but his personal favorite was one.

According to the Detroit News, Holmes clarified, "I like every guy we brought in." "I think Isaac TeSlaa is the person I bonded with the most, though. In my heart, he was my guy, even though he wasn't the best wideout according to rankings.

A Controversial Trade, But a Clear Vision

Because the deal featured substantial future assets, Holmes' aggressive pursuit of TeSlaa caused some NFL circles to take notice. The Lions gave up both of their 2026 third-round picks and their 2025 third-round pick (ranked 102nd overall). TeSlaa was selected with the 70th pick in 2025, and they were also given sixth-round picks in 2025 and 2026 in exchange. Holmes' audacious choice demonstrated his faith in the young receiver's abilities.

Holmes maintained the choice even though some people questioned the decision to give up so much cash. He pointed out that each year's draft depth and quality varies, and 2025 didn't have as many mid-round jewels as prior years.

"You might say, 'This guy went in the third round,' or 'That guy was a fourth-round steal,' when you look back at previous drafts," Holmes stated. However, each draft is unique. This lesson, like the previous ones, hasn't been as in-depth. Sticking at 102 this year would have required us to take a guy that we regarded much less. For us, moving ahead was the right decision.

Holmes also noted that TeSlaa was among the best players they had left on their board at the time of the deal, both at receiver and overall, according to their evaluations.

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TeSlaa’s Fit with Detroit’s Culture

TeSlaa, a native of Michigan who came to Arkansas from Hillsdale College, didn't have particularly impressive college stats: he caught 62 passes for 897 yards in two seasons with the Razorbacks. He was not required to run a whole route tree in Arkansas's system, and his numbers didn't impress anyone. On tape, however, the Lions saw something they adored.

Why was TeSlaa so attractive? Holmes and his team think that game tape, rather than merely raw data or metrics, provides the true narrative. The Lions front staff wore black sweatshirts with the letters H.W.S. — height, weight, speed — crossed out on them on Day 2 of the draft. The message was unambiguous: emphasize football skills rather than just physical attributes.

Nevertheless, it's important to remember that TeSlaa was among the draft's most athletic wide receivers. At the 2025 NFL Combine, he had the highest Athleticism Score of any receiver who competed, standing at 6' 4 and 214 pounds. But his Production Score only came in at number 48. The argument over his selection value was further stoked by this discrepancy between his potential and his performance.

Holmes made it clear that the Lions are not only riding on TeSlaa's past performance but also on what he may become with the correct coaching and fit.

A Calculated Gamble with Long-Term Upside

The Lions' roster and reputation have been restored under Holmes' direction. Holmes has gained the confidence of Detroit supporters by bringing in standout players like Alim McNeill and Amon-Ra St. Brown in the middle rounds and by altering the team's culture. However, not every swing is successful, and this audacious transaction will be examined for years to come.

That is the truth about decisions made on draft day. The price of two further third-round selections will appear insignificant if TeSlaa proves to be a consistent big-slot target and has a big impact. However, detractors may label this move a mistake if he is only used on special teams or if he doesn't make a smooth transition to the NFL.

Although Holmes is aware of the dangers, he has faith in the procedure and the team's internal assessments. Trusting their board and instincts is part of the winning recipe for a front staff that has made Detroit a serious postseason contender.

Holmes stated, "We consider every move from the perspective of our own board, not what other people may think." "A player's fit with our squad, culture, and objectives is what counts. TeSlaa fulfilled those requirements for us.

In the end, the decision regarding this choice won't be made right away. It will take time to thoroughly evaluate its impact, as is the case with many draft decisions. However, in Brad Holmes' opinion, Detroit added a player he was most enthusiastic about in the entire class in addition to a promising receiver.

Furthermore, in the NFL today, belief can occasionally be just as potent as statistics.

April 23rd, 2025

The 2025 NFL Draft is just around the corner, taking place from April 24 to April 26 in Green Bay, Wisconsin, at the legendary Lambeau Field. The first round kicks off on Thursday, April 24. NFL fans are eagerly anticipating the next wave of talent that could shape the future of their favorite teams. As fans gear up for the big event, sports enthusiasts are not only following their teams’ picks but also diving into the excitement of sports betting. Many fans are already buzzing with predictions, while others are getting excited and involved with NFL-themed games using platforms like Legalcasino to find the best sites to play.

Top prospects to watch

This year’s draft class is packed with standout talent. Some of the top prospects to watch include:

• Travis Hunter (CB/WR, Colorado): Hunter’s dual-threat ability makes him one of the most exciting players in the draft, and many experts have him pegged as a top pick.
• Abdul Carter (EDGE, Penn State): A dynamic edge rusher, Carter is drawing comparisons to Micah Parsons and is expected to have an immediate impact at the next level.
• Ashton Jeanty (RB, Boise State): Known for his agility, Jeanty is among the top running back prospects and has a chance to make a big splash early in his career.
• Tetairoa McMillan (WR, Arizona): A rising star, McMillan’s route-running skills make him one of the most exciting wide receivers to enter the NFL.
• Shedeur Sanders (QB, Colorado): The son of Deion Sanders, Shedeur is already garnering attention as a potential first-round pick with his impressive poise and accuracy.

Draft experience in Green Bay

Fans attending the draft in Green Bay will enjoy a host of events throughout the city. The festivities will span the Titletown District and the Resch Complex, offering everything from live entertainment to exclusive fan experiences. The NFL Draft Theater, located near Lambeau Field, will serve as the focal point for the event, providing fans with a front-row seat to the selection process. Green Bay has truly transformed into a must-visit destination for football fans.

How to watch

For those who can’t attend, the draft will be broadcast live on ESPN and NFL Network, with the NFL OnePass app also providing exclusive coverage and updates. The draft promises to deliver moments of excitement and surprises for every football fan.

What’s at stake

For teams, the draft is a crucial opportunity to build for the future. With high-caliber talent like Carter and Sanders on the board, the stakes couldn’t be higher. As the season unfolds, teams that make strong draft choices could see themselves competing for a Super Bowl title in the near future.

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April 14th, 2025

By Stephen Juza

As we continue our blog series that looks at coaching wins leaders to start their career, we pick up where we left off yesterday. After Paul Brown’s historic run with the Browns came to an end and a sluggish start to his career several years later with the Cincinnati Bengals, Brown was surpassed in wins by Don Shula. After a strong start to his career in Baltimore, Shula continued his career in Miami and surpassed Brown’s win total 220 games into his career.

Shula is the total career wins leader for coaches, and after a strong decade, nabbed the top spot from his former head coach, Brown. So, in today’s article, let us look at Shula’s NFL start through his 268 wins - when he was briefly caught as the wins leader to start a career.

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Shula’s NFL Beginning

Before Shula was an NFL coach, he was a player. After he graduated from college, the Cleveland Browns, coached by Paul Brown, drafted Shula in the ninth round, who would make the team as one of only two rookies for the team that year. Shula played in all twelve games his rookie year, including one start, en route to an NFL championship game appearance.

However, his next season did not start as planned. The following year, he was called up to active military duty as a member of the Ohio Army National Guard and served briefly in Ohio and Louisiana until he returned to Cleveland in November. With five games left in the season, he returned to the team as a full-time starter for the injury-riddled team, with the season ending in another championship game loss.

In 1953, he was traded to the newest franchise in the NFL, the Baltimore Colts where he played until the 1956 season. After two back-to-back championship appearances with the Browns, Shula’s remaining career was far less successful. In his four seasons in Baltimore, the team was never able to achieve a winning record. Shula finished his NFL career with one more season in Washington, another losing record, before finally retiring from the NFL.

After his playing career ended, Shula entered the coaching ranks, first in college, before moving on to the NFL. After several years as an NFL assistant, he had his first opportunity to lead a team - his former team, the Baltimore Colts.

Baltimore Colts

In 1963, Shula began his hall of fame career in Baltimore, but he did not burst on to the season in his inaugural season like his former coach. His first year, the team went 8-6, good for third in the conference. However, his second season was far more successful, and a sign of what could come. 1964 saw the team finish with a record of 12-2, winning the NFL West division, but falling short of a championship with a loss against his former team, the Browns.

Throughout the sixties, he continued to build the Colts into a championship-contending squad. By the 1969 season, his final in Baltimore, the team had finished first in the NFL four times, and second three other times. His best year in Baltimore was 1968, an impressive 13-1 season where the team won the NFL championship but fell to Joe Namath and the AFL Champion New York Jets.

After the 1969 season, Shula left the Colts after receiving a lucrative offer from the Miami Dolphins, a wide-ranging deal that included the role of general manager and an equity stake in the franchise. However, due to the process the Dolphins went through, they were penalized by the NFL for tampering with Shula, and the team lost their first-round draft pick the following season. However, it was a trade the team was happy to make.

Miami Dolphins

While he finished his Colts career with an impressive winning percentage over 75%, along with countless championship appearances, it was in Miami where Shula’s career went from great to legendary. Entering his first season in Miami, he had the fourth-most wins through ninety-eight games to start a career, thirteen behind Brown. It took Shula most of the decade to catch his former mentor, which he did with his 161st win. But it was a wildly successful decade to get there.

The Dolphins 1972 season was one for the record books. Shula’s third season in Florida saw the team complete a perfect 14-0 regular season, en route to Shula’s first Super Bowl victory in his career. In addition to winning every single game, the team led the league in points scored on offense, and fewest points allowed on defense. Overall, this team was ranked #1 on the NFL’s list of greatest teams for the league's 100th anniversary.

The team followed up a perfect season with another spectacular season, 12-2 with Shula’s second Super Bowl victory. While that would be the last Super Bowl victory of his career, consistent success was a mark of the years to follow. In 1978, Shula caught up to Brown on the Wins through X Games chart.

In this cart above, each column represents the “Ones” digit, while each row represents the “Tens” digit into a coach's career.

For more than 150 games, Shula held the record despite the dropping win percentage. During the 11-year run at the top, his win percentage was more than ten percentage points below his career average (74% compared to 63.5%). However, it took a historic run from another coach and dynasty to surpass Shula, however briefly.

We will profile this coach in Part 4 of our series.

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April 13th, 2025

By Stephen Juza

In yesterday’s article, we began looking at the coaching career wins leaders to begin a career. No one started hotter out of the gate than Jim Caldwell of the Indianapolis Colts, but his time in the limelight was short-lived. After a brief, dominating run through two seasons, the bottom fell out from the Colts when a neck injury sidelined quarterback Peyton Manning, leading to his firing at the end of the season.

George Seifert was the next coach to take the crown, guiding the 49ers dynasty to new heights and leading the transition from one hall of famer quarterback, Joe Montana, to another hall of fame quarterback, Steve Young. Seifert’s run was similarly short-lived as Caldwell’s, who was soon surpassed by Paul Brown of the eponymous Cleveland Browns. This is where we begin today’s blog, mid-Brown’s dynasty at 101 games into Brown’s NFL career.

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In this cart above, each column represents the “Ones” digit, while each row represents the “Tens” digit into a coach's career.

Game 101-238 - Paul Brown’s Domination

In yesterday’s article, we talked about Brown taking over the career leaders spot at 33 games into his career, amidst a remarkable run in the AAFC that led to four straight championships. His success lasted much longer than just the AAFC, with him holding the undisputed top spot from games thirty-three until 218.

So, what made him so good? Today, we look at the countless inventions and strategies that Brown implemented throughout his career, and how it shaped the modern NFL that we know and love today.

• Inventions

Brown is credited with many inventions, both on and off the field. One merely cosmetic invention that he helped implement is the modern facemask. In the earlier days of the NFL, helmets had no facemask to protect players.

While players started wearing some form of a facemask as in the 1930s, Brown would help develop and patent the material that led to the initial single-bar facemask that debuted in 1954. From there, further development has shaped the helmet into what we know and recognize today. This modern football helmet also has a radio-receiver in it to help facilitate communication between the quarterback and the coaching staff. Guess who was one of the first coaches to trial this technology. Paul Brown.

During the 1956 season, Brown worked with a local electronics salesman to help fashion a device to radio in plays to his offense. While there were issues and controversy with his initial implementation of the receiver, NFL commissioner Bert Bell eventually banned the technology.

• Strategies

Brown also took an academic approach to his coaching as well. This included the fact that he was one of the first coaches to study game films, of both his team and of the opponents. He was not just collecting tendencies through film; he was also the first coach to place an assistant coach in the press box during the game to collect information to then relay this back to the entire coaching staff.

Oh, and regarding the coaching staff? Brown was the first head coach to hire a full-time coaching staff when he was hired to lead the Cleveland Browns. It’s no wonder that the Browns left everyone in the dust during the four-year run of the AAFC.

While we may not be able to visualize what the NFL looked like before Brown, it also extends to what types of plays may have been called. One such play that seems almost rudimentary to imagine a game without is the draw play - faking a pass play and then handing it off to a running back.

The End of Paul Brown's Reign

All good things must end though, and Brown’s run in Cleveland ended in 1962. Brown re-emerged in Cincinnati a few years later, but the magic was gone. He lost his status as the record-holder to Don Shula during his first season in Cincinnati, a 3-11 campaign that was his worst NFL season to date. At 160 games into a coaching career, Brown had company at the top, with Shula passing him at Game 161.

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By Stephen Juza,

April 12th, 2025

Last week, the NFL Competition Committee voted to recognize statistics from the All-American Football Conference (AAFC) as their own. While the AAFC was only around for a mere four years before having the top teams absorbed into the NFL (while the rest of the teams were divided up amongst the remaining teams), this act does reshape some aspects of the NFL record book.

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One notable inclusion is Paul Brown’s early dominance with the Cleveland Browns. Four seasons that lead to four championships in the AAFC before continuing the team’s dominance into the NFL. Few coaches have seen that amount of early success, so in today’s blog we thought we would look at the coaching career wins leader through the first X number of games in their career, starting with the first 100 games of their career.

In this cart above, each column represents the “Ones” digit, while each row represents the “Tens” digit into a coach's career.

Games 1-14: Jim Caldwell Sets the Standard

Lots of coaches start their career with a win streak. In fact, 180 coaches to date have won their first-ever NFL game as a head coach. As the weeks continue, the list of undefeated coaches shrinks by about half, until we have our first ever sole career wins leader at 9-0 to start his career in Jim Caldwell.

Caldwell may have started his head coaching career in about as great of circumstances as possible. The long-time quarterbacks coach for the Colts inherited a winning team from Hall of Fame coach Tony Dungy, with future Hall of Fame quarterback Peyton Manning behind center. With an offense loaded to the brim with talent, and a defense full of playmakers, Caldwell’s first season was record-breaking. The 2009 Colts started the season incredibly hot, eventually getting to 14-0 before the question that always follows a playoff-clinching win. Would Caldwell rest key players down the stretch?

The answer would be “yes”. While Manning and others sat considerable portions of the final two games, the offense was dismal behind backup quarterback Curtis Painter, who completed eight of twenty eight passes in the final two games of the season. The Colts would ultimately drop both games, ending Caldwell’s record of 14 wins to start the season as the mark to beat for any coach. While the season started hot for the Colts, it unfortunately ended in disappointment at the hands of the New Orleans Saints in the Super Bowl.

Games 16-30: George Seifert Takes the Crown

While Caldwell sat the starters for the final two games of the 2009 season, his run as the wins leader ended at 15 games into his career when others caught up. While a total of six coaches have started their coaching career 14-2, George Seifert emerges as the next record holder by his 20th game.

If Caldwell started in great circumstances, that may pale in comparison to the team that Seifert took over. Seifert inherited a team that had just won the Super Bowl (with three wins in the prior eight years). While Seifert had been the team’s defensive coordinator during their run, the offensive talent was loaded: Joe Montana at quarterback, throwing passes to Jerry Rice and Dwight Clark, and handing the ball off to Roger Craig. No matter which direction the opposing defense looked, All-Pro or Hall of Famers were making plays.

Seifert started his head coaching career with a Super Bowl victory in his first season, followed by a loss in the conference championship in his second, at one point reaching 27 wins in his first 30 games. But a loss in Week 15 to the Saints would allow the next coach to step up and tie Seifert’s remarkable pace to begin his career.

Games 31-100: Paul Brown’s Sustained Dominance

While Seifert may have had the best two seasons to start a career, it pales in comparison to the sustained success of Paul Brown. With the incorporation of the AAFC record books into NFL history, the league recognizes the Cleveland Browns success during the late 40s. With that recognition, Paul Brown holds the record of career wins through X games from 33 games through the end of the chart (100 games).

Last week, we wrote how the Browns dominance over the fledgling league partly led to the downfall of the AAFC. Four seasons, four championships. But the Browns dominance didn’t end there. Even after the Browns joined the NFL (game 53 in the above chart), Brown and the Browns kept the winning vibes going, winning three NFL championships in the first decade in the NFL. Not only that, they appeared in every championship game from 1950-1955. Overall, there would be only a single losing season for Brown in Cleveland, a 5-7 showing in 1956.

Over the next week, we will continue the deep dive into the career wins record through X game into a coaches career.

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