Rob Leonard Wants His Defense to Think. First He Needs Bodies.

The early word out of training camp is that Rob Leonard's defense is showing something. Players making calls, adjusting on the fly, taking ownership of their assignments rather than waiting to be told. Leonard has been explicit about what he wants — a unit that processes and reacts rather than executes by rote — and by the accounts coming out of camp, the early signs are real.

The problem is the roster underneath that philosophy. I've written about this twice already: Devin White is in Detroit, and the linebacker room is thinner for it. White led the team with 174 tackles last season, and that production doesn't just get absorbed — it gets redistributed to a group that hasn't proven it can carry it. Jermod McCoy, who missed all of 2025 with a knee injury, remains Questionable. Chris Collier is on Injured Reserve. Corey Rucker went on IR earlier this month. The players Leonard needs to execute his system are, in several cases, unavailable or uncertain.

Undrafted free agents like Cian Slone and Xavian Sorey are competing for snaps, which is fine — every camp has that story. But there's a difference between depth competition and depth necessity, and this camp is closer to the latter. Ownership-based defense is a sound concept. It asks players to be decisive, which is exactly what this team wasn't in close games last year. The question for the next few weeks is whether Leonard has enough healthy, experienced players to make the philosophy stick when it counts.