The Detroit Lions continue to make moves to build out their personnel department, and their latest addition brings quite the resume as a young and emerging talent in the personnel space.
CBS Sports shares that the Lions are expected to hire John Collins, the assistant director of personnel at Michigan, as a scouting assistant. Collins has been with the Wolverines since 2024, giving him experience on the college side of talent evaluation before making the jump to the NFL level.
Before landing in Ann Arbor, Collins spent two years at Georgia, who has been one of the premier programs in college football over the last several years with Kirby Smart at the helm, annually ranking among the top recruiting classes in college football. The Bulldogs won back-to-back national championships in 2021 and 2022 under Smart and his staff, making Georgia's football operation one of the most respected in the country.
From Georgia to Michigan to Detroit. That is a resume built inside winning programs.
The Lions, of course, have been one of the best-run organizations in the NFL over the last few years. Detroit reached the NFC Championship Game after the 2023 season and followed that with another strong 2024 campaign, finishing 15-2 in the regular season before falling to the Washington Commanders in the divisional round of the playoffs. General manager Brad Holmes and head coach Dan Campbell are responsibly for a culture flip in Detroit that is drawing personnel people who want to be part of something special.
Adding a young evaluator with college experience on both the Power Four and national championship level is exactly the kind of depth move that well-run front offices make. Scouting pipelines are built one hire at a time, and getting someone who has worked in two blue-blood programs gives Detroit another set of talented eyes with a strong foundation.
Collins now steps into an NFL environment under Holmes, who came up through the Los Angeles Rams' personnel department before taking the GM job in Detroit in 2021. Holmes has emphasized building a staff of smart, hungry evaluators, and Collins fits that mold on paper.
For coaches and personnel people watching the front office landscape, this is certainly a move worth tracking. The path from college personnel departments to the NFL is well-worn, and Collins is the latest to make that transition.
Stay tuned to The Scoop for the latest.