Sunday open thread: Grade the Detroit Lions’ roster cuts

For the time being, the 2017 Detroit Lions have their 53-man roster for Week 1 of the regular season. On Friday and Saturday, the Lions traded and cut their way down to the roster limit by the 4 p.m. deadline, but their work is not done yet.

Not only will the Lions start building their 10-man practice squad roster on Sunday, but they could also add a few new players from the waiver wire.

But before we start looking into the future, let’s analyze the past. Over the past three days, the Lions have made over 30 transactions. Some of the moves had long been expected, but there were a handful of surprises along the way.

While we can all agree this is far from a perfect roster, there may be some disagreement with what the Lions did with what they have. So today’s Question of the Day is:

Give what the Lions had to work with, how would you grade their roster cuts?

My answer: I give general manager Bob Quinn and the Lions a “B” for their roster moves over the weekend.

The Lions get high marks alone for turning two guys they were likely to cut—Laken Tomlinson and Johnson Bademosi—into a fifth and sixth-round draft, respectively.

In my roster prediction, I only missed on four guys: Tion Green, Jared Abbrederis, Nick Bellore and Kasey Redfern. Of those choices, the only one I have a real question about is Tion Green.

I’m more than happy for Green and all the hard work he’s put in to make the final roster. But I’m having a hard time understanding why the Lions would bother keeping five running backs on the roster. Either Dwayne Washington or Green is likely to be inactive on gamedays, and the one who is active will probably only be used on special teams.

However, this doesn’t bother me much, because I have a hard time picking a specific player to make the team over Green. The Lions could use help on both the offensive and defensive lines—they only kept nine of each—but there really isn’t a cut player worthy of being on this roster.

If I had to guess, they’ll add at least one player on the defensive line, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Green as the first player waived to make room. There’s a pretty good chance he’d clear waivers and return to the practice squad anyways.

So while the roster still has plenty of room to improve, I think Quinn made the best of what he got, and hopefully he’ll make a few more moves before next Sunday to make the roster even better.

Your turn.