Notes: 2 Detroit Lions taken in first 2 rounds of PFF Forecast’s re-draft

It looks like we have now hit the fantasy franchise rebuild portion of off-season boredom in professional football circles. On Monday, our Notes had an item about a four-round draft of so-called foundational players to start all 32 teams in the league using the draft order of the most recently completed draft in April. The Lions ended up with the current league MVP at the third overall pick and a pretty good secondary.

Now, Pro Football Focus’s PFF Forecast show is getting into the fantasy rebuild game. George Chahrouri and Eric Eager hosted a six-way video call on their YouTube channel (with guests Evan Silva, Josh Hermsmeyer, Kevin Cole, and Timo Riske), complete with a ticker and overlay like the usual NFL draft coverage would have. The group completed two rounds in two hours on Thursday:

The Lions landed Russell Wilson and Robert Woods under the stewardship of Eric Eager, but fans are probably more interested in how early the players who actually play for the Lions in real life were selected. As expected, almost all of the first round selections were quarterbacks: 27 of the first 28 picks were quarterbacks. Matthew Stafford was the 12th overall selection (24 minutes into the video), right ahead of Jimmy Garoppolo, Kirk Cousins, Drew Brees, and Tua Tagovailoa.

More interesting, though, was the Detroit player selected in the second round by Josh Hermsmeyer for fantasy Houston (about 74 minutes into the video). I agree with Chris Burke from The Athletic:

Only four wide receivers were selected ahead of Kenny Golladay by the re-draft roundtable: Chris Godwin, DeAndre Hopkins, Tyreek Hill, and A.J. Brown. Golladay was taken immediately in front of Odell Beckham Jr., Mike Evans, and Michael Thomas. The other thing noteworthy here is how all of the fantasy general managers were selecting players to start franchises: the passing game on offense and pass rush plus secondary on defense.

Somewhat surprisingly, Darius Slay was not one of the 10 defensive backs picked in the first two rounds. Other familiar names still on the board: Golden Tate and Trey Flowers. Looking forward to them finishing out the last two rounds (the Google Sheet they are tracking with has four rounds on it) of their Forecast re-draft to see if T.J. Hockenson makes anyone’s list.

And now let’s move on to the rest of today’s Notes:

• Detroit linebacker Christian Jones was a guest on Episode 85 of Tori Petry’s podcast.

• Running back Bo Scarbrough joined Michael Rothstein from ESPN on his podcast on Thursday.

• Former Lions still getting together to do good things (h/t to @davebirkett):

• Touchdown Wire’s Mark Schofield has a great series of articles going up: one for each team in the league highlighting something interesting about that particular team. Although he has not gotten to Detroit yet, these are all really good reads. So far, he has done San Francisco, Las Vegas, and Denver.

• Perhaps a future coach in Michigan at the college or pro level someday?