Lions rookie minicamp update: Frank Ragnow appears to be taking snaps at left guard

With the media completely closed out of Detroit Lions rookie minicamp, which enters its third and final day on Sunday, there’s very little news to come out of the practices. Basically, all we have access to are daily photos and highlights from the offseason workouts that are provided from the team itself.

But that won’t stop us from digging and trying to parse any information from our limited resources. And, thankfully, we may have found something quite relevant to the future of the Lions thanks to some help from the Detroit Free Press’ Dave Birkett.

During Day 1’s highlight reel, the Lions may have revealed some important information about their first-round draft pick Frank Ragnow. Check it out:

Did you catch it? Ragnow is #77 and is featured heavily in the short highlight reel, and it’s not what he’s doing that’s important, but where he’s playing. Take a look:

At the five-second mark, Ragnow is lined up in between #74 (on his left) offensive tackle Dan Skipper and #75 (on his right) center Leo Koloamatangi. In other words, it looks like he’s practicing at left guard. You can see the exact same lineup at the 32-second mark of the video.

This could obviously be a huge development in regards to the future of the Lions’ offensive line. With last year’s center Travis Swanson now playing for the Jets, the Lions have a decision to make: Keep Ragnow at his college position of center to fill in the vacancy, or move Graham Glasgow to center while sliding Ragnow to left guard.

This is just rookie minicamp, and the rest of the Lions’ starting offensive line isn’t even present, so we could be reading too much into this. However, it’s worth noting that the Lions went through a similar conundrum two years ago. After drafting Taylor Decker in the first round of the 2016 draft, fans were left to wonder whether Detroit would spot Decker at right tackle and keep Riley Reiff at left tackle, or groom Decker at left tackle from Day 1. The Lions chose the latter, having Decker take snaps at left tackle during the entire offseason, including rookie minicamp.

It’s unlikely that anything is set in stone at this point in the offseason. After drafting Ragnow, general manager Bob Quinn said he’ll use the offseason to figure things out. “I think once Frank gets here and we talk to him a little bit more, put him in our program, put him in our scheme, kind of see how he progresses through the rest of the offseason program and into OTA’s,” Quinn said. “Listen, we don’t play a game until August, so I think we have a lot of time to figure it out.”

UPDATE: As pointed out by Twitter user @Megatron81_, there are some pictures of Ragnow at center, too, including this one the Lions chose to use as a thumbnail for their highlights video: