Detroit Paid $67.5 Million to Keep Its Best Weapon. Now It Needs to Find Someone to Open a Hole for Him.

The front office made its statement. Three years, $67.5 million — the richest running back contract in NFL history, signed to keep Jahmyr Gibbs in Detroit. The message was clear: this offense is real, this core is worth protecting, and the Lions are building toward something after a 9-8 season that should have been more. The problem is that the thing most responsible for making Gibbs dangerous — the offensive line in front of him — is currently falling apart in real time.

Cade Mays, Detroit's starting center, is out 8-10 weeks with a wrist injury. That's not a preseason inconvenience. An 8-10 week absence from a starting center puts him somewhere between Week 6 and Week 8 on a return timeline, assuming everything heals cleanly and he needs no ramp-up. The Lions will open the season with an unproven interior, asking whoever steps into that gap to anchor the protection for Jared Goff and create the running lanes that made Gibbs worth $67.5 million in the first place. The depth chart shows Larry Borom, Devin Cochran, and Colby Sorsdal as the available interior options. None of them have demonstrated they can hold a starting center role in a competitive NFL season.

This matters more for Detroit than it would for most teams because of what we already know about how this offense operates under pressure. Last season, Gibbs ran for 1,223 yards and 13 touchdowns. Goff threw for 4,564 yards and 34 touchdowns. Amon-Ra St. Brown caught 117 passes for 1,401 yards and 11 scores. The skill-position production was genuinely elite — and the Lions still went 9-8 and missed the playoffs. They went 2-5 in games decided by a touchdown or fewer, a close-game collapse that directly cost them a postseason berth. When the margin tightened, Detroit couldn't execute. An offensive line that can't hold up under duress in the fourth quarter of a one-score game is precisely the kind of structural weakness that turns a 2-5 close-game record into a 1-6 one.

I wrote last week that this team has the most dangerous skill players in the NFC and almost no infrastructure to protect them. The Mays injury sharpens that argument to a point. The Lions' wide receiver depth is a genuine organizational concern — Tom Kennedy is the listed starter at that position, and his production last season was a fraction of what a starting NFL wide receiver should generate. Now add a center hole to the receiver hole, and you have an offense that is theoretically explosive but practically fragile at multiple pressure points simultaneously. Gibbs can't manufacture yards that don't exist. Goff can't throw from his back.

My read is that this is the question that defines Detroit's 2026 season before it starts: not whether Gibbs was worth the money — he was — but whether the Lions can field a functional offensive line around him by Week 1. The news coverage is already asking whether Detroit needs to add a center externally, and that's the right question. The internal options are unproven. The timeline is tight. And the margin for error, for a team that already knows what close-game failure costs, is essentially zero.