Over the past three years, the Detroit Lions have invested a lot of draft picks on their defensive front. Their line features five players drafted on either Day 1 or Day 2 of the past three drafts. While Aidan Hutchinson, Alim McNeill, and Josh Paschal are now regular and productive members of the line, two stand out for not having a big impact yet in their early careers: 2021 second-round pick Levi Onwuzurike and 2023 third-round pick Brodric Martin.
For Onwuzurike, it’s been a tough road battling through injury. While he played in all 16 games in his rookie season, his body was not right. Dealing with a back injury, he often couldn’t just sit down in meetings, and it clearly impacted his play on the field
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“At the end of my rookie year, I was thankful that I just survived it,” Onwuzurike wrote in an essay published earlier this year. “Seriously. I played 16 games, but not at the level I wanted. A part of me wondered, ‘Is this what the rest of my career will look like? I don’t want to play like this forever. I don’t want my back to feel like this forever.’”
After electing to have season-ending surgery in 2022, Onwuzurike is back and—according to him—beyond the physical and mental hurdles of the back injury. Yet despite that, the defensive tackle has yet to make an impact on the game. He’s played in more than 15 snaps just once all season and has been a healthy scratch in three of the four last contests.
Defensive line coach John Scott Jr., though, still sees a bright future in Onwuzurike.
“I think we sometimes forget Levi basically missed a year and a half of football,” Scott said on Tuesday. “That’s a huge learning curve when you’re not able to get out on the field. Levi is another guy. He has some great talent. We see progression every day — It’ll come for Levi.”
It’s a different story for Martin. Coming out of Western Kentucky—a relatively small Conference
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