The video resides on the home page of Follett’s website.

http://www.zakarianfollett.com/

Player Tender Offer & Compensations:
DE Copeland Bryan  – Not tendered
S Daniel Bullocks – Right of First Refusal (ROFR) & Original Draft Compensation* 
C Dylan Gandy – ROFR & Original Draft Compensation
CB Kevin Hobbs – ROFR
DE Jason Hunter – ROFR & 2nd Round Compensation
G Daniel Loper – ROFR
G Manny Ramirez – ROFR & Original Draft Compensation
S Ko Simpson - ROFR & Original Draft Compensation
LB Cody Spencer - Not tendered

* NFL Rules state that if a team uses a second-round tender on a player who’s original round is less than that, then the compensation for any other former second-round pick who is tendered at their original round must drop one round. Since DE Jason Hunter entered the league as an undrafted free agent and was tendered with ROFR/2nd round pick, the compensation for S Daniel Bullocks, who was tendered at his original round (2nd round), would drop to a third round pick.

Lewand also confirmed the following players would be retained as exclusive rights free agents: LB Zack Follett, G Corey Hilliard, TE Jake Nordin, RB Cedric Peerman and CB DeAngelo Smith.

Among the players listed, defensive end Jason Hunter, who originally entered the league as an undrafted free agent, was tendered the highest based on his contributions last season.

Lewand: “Jason obviously contributed last year in a pretty significant way after we claimed him off waivers. I think he showed that he’s got the ability to contribute even more as he stays in the system and (grows in) his role. As we get more players in here and we get more talent around all of them, the guys who remain here will become even better and I put Jason in that category. Jason has value; defensive ends are valuable commodities in this league. It’s a valuable position and Jason had some production there last year.”

Moving forward, the main focus for Lewand and the rest of the Lions’ front office will be the free agent market.

With the start of free agency beginning tonight at midnight, they’ll have their work cut out for them.

Lewand: “As Martin (Mayhew) said last week, our plan is to be selectively aggressive. We have always been able to put together actions that match our plan and we’ll be ready tonight to be on the phone. After midnight, we’ll be in touch with the players that we’re interested in and we’ll see where it takes us. But we’re prepared and our team has done a good job of getting ready for the free agency period to begin and we’re looking forward to starting after midnight tonight.”

2010 NFL FREE AGENCY QUESTIONS & ANSWERS:

Q.  When can players start being signed in the 2010 free agency signing period?

A.  Beginning at 12:01 AM ET on Friday, March 5. 
           
Q.  What are the categories of free agency?

A.  Players are either “restricted” or “unrestricted” free agents.  Within the categories are also “transition” and “franchise” players.

Q.  What is the time period for free agency signings this year?

A.  For restricted free agents, from March 5 to April 15.  For unrestricted free agents who have received the June 1 tender from their prior Club, from March 5 to July 22 (or the first scheduled day of the first NFL training camp, whichever is later).  For franchise players, from March 5 until the Tuesday after the 10th week of the regular-season (November 16).  If he does not sign by November 16, he must sit out the season.  There are no transition player designations this year.

Q.  What is the difference between a restricted free agent and an unrestricted free agent?

A.  In the 2010 League Year, players become restricted free agents when they complete three, four or five accrued seasons and their contract expires.  Unrestricted free agents have completed six or more accrued seasons.  An unrestricted free agent is free to sign with any club with no compensation owed to his old club.

Q.  What constitutes an “accrued season?”

A.  Six or more regular-season games on a club’s active/inactive, reserved-injured or “physically unable to perform” lists.

Q.  Other than accrued seasons, what determines a restricted free agent? 

A.  He has received a “qualifying” offer (a salary level predetermined by the Collective Bargaining Agreement between the league and its players) from his old club.  He can negotiate with any club through April 15.  If the restricted free agent accepts an offer sheet from a new club, his old club can match the offer and retain him because it has the “right of first refusal.”  If the old club does not match the offer, it can possibly receive draft-choice compensation depending on the amount of its qualifying offer.  If an offer sheet is not executed, and the player receives the June 1 tender from his old club, the player’s rights revert exclusively to his old club on June 1.

Q.  What determines an unrestricted free agent?

A.  A player with six or more accrued seasons whose contract has expired.  He is free to sign with any club, with no compensation owed to his old club, through July 22 (or the first scheduled day of the first NFL training camp, whichever is later).  At that point, his rights revert to his old club if it made a “tender” offer (110 percent of last year’s salary) to him by June 1.  His old club then has until the Tuesday after the 10th week of the season (November 16) to sign him.  If he does not sign by November 16, he must sit out the season.  If no tender is offered by June 1, the player can be signed by any club at any time throughout the season. 

Q.  What determines a transition player?

A.  A transition player must be offered a minimum of the average of the top 10 salaries of the prior season at the player’s
position or 120 percent of the player’s prior year’s salary, whichever is greater.  A transition player designation gives
the club a first-refusal right to match within seven days an offer sheet given to the player by another club after his
contract expires.  If the club matches, it retains the player.  If it does not match, it receives no draft pick compensation
from that club.  In 2010, a club may designate a franchise player or a transition player in lieu of a franchise player, as
well as one additional transition player. 

Q.  What determines a franchise player?

A.  The salary level offer by a player’s club determines what type of franchise player he is.  An “exclusive” franchise player — not free to sign with another club — is offered a minimum of the average of the top five salaries at the player’s position for the current year as of April 15, or 120 percent of the player’s previous year’s salary, or the average of the top five salaries at his position as of the end of last season — whichever of the three is greater.  If a player is offered a minimum of the average of the top five salaries of last season at his position, or 120 percent of the player’s previous year’s salary, he becomes a “non-exclusive” franchise player and can negotiate with other clubs.  His old club can match a new club’s offer, or receive two first-round draft choices if it decides not to match. 

Q.  Can a club decide to withdraw its franchise or transition designations on a player?

A.  Yes

Q.  Can a club then use them on other players?

A.  Not in the 2010 season.  A club can withdraw its franchise or transition designations and the player then automatically becomes an unrestricted free agent either immediately or when his contract expires.

Those prospects having moved on to the NFL Scouting Combine, are speaking about the fact that they, too, benefitted from the interactions with the Lions’ staff.

Cincinnati WR Mardy Gilyard was one of the North Team’s top performers in the Senior Bowl and one of the sought-after prospects at the combine.

Gilyard: “The Lions staff is just one of a kind. Those were the coaches that I felt like I really needed as a player. Shawn Jefferson, the coach, was really, really, really, really strict amongst (all the) guys, but it seemed like he was real strict on me. He did a lot of yelling, getting in my face a lot. I can remember day one, he’s like, ‘Man, we want to send you home, man.’

“I needed stuff like that because, as a player, when you’re good and you feel like you’re good – not that you take anything for granted – but sometimes you get lackadaisical and you need that kick in your butt to get you moving. They gave me that.

“The coaches really gave me what I needed – my position coach – and they worked my butt off there. It was just an experience I’ll never forget.”

Gilyard is a player who went through adversity in his collegiate career, losing his scholarship after his sophomore season due to academics.

He lived in his car and worked four jobs before going back to Cincinnati.

Gilyard: “Me and Coach Jefferson spoke a lot about life (and) this whole process of me leaving the Senior Bowl coming in to when I would actually be drafted. He was also telling me, ‘Mardy, you need to make sure that you just stay out of the way. You don’t need to get in any trouble. If you hang with a crew, tell your crew you’ll hang with them when you get time to. This is the time that you need to be indoors.’

“He’s like, ‘You got a dog? You got a girl?’ I was like, ‘Well, I got a dog; I ain’t got no girl.’ He was like, ‘Well, you need to spend all your time with your dog, inside the house.’”

Gilyard says he has been spending time with his dog, Kane’O, to follow Jefferson’s advice.

Wayne State RB Joique Bell was also on the North Team roster with the Lions’ staff. Bell says he benefitted from the week of practice more than he did the actual game.

Bell: “The practices (are) where you make your name. They say a lot of the scouts don’t really stay for the game – they leave before the game. For me, my effort that I gave out there on the field, I think is what really stood out to the scouts, so of course I think that practice helped me out more than the game.”

Like Gilyard, Bell also received words of wisdom from his position coach and former NFL player, Sam Gash.

Bell: “He’s a good guy. He stayed on us – he stayed on us a lot. He wanted the best out of us. He demanded it and didn’t expect anything less. It wasn’t anything that I expected less of myself. He was a good guy.”

While Gilyard was coming off adversity he experienced during his collegiate career, Bell used the Senior Bowl to put his talent level up against the top Division-I players.

Bell: “It was great being able to get out there with the D-I prospects and being able to showcase my talent.

“Not only that, but meeting new people, making new friends – made a lot of friends with Mardy Gilyard, Jacoby Ford, Sean Witherspoon, Chris Cook, LeGarrette Blount – just to be able to go out there and just to be able to meet the top-tier guys and be able to compete with them was great. It was fun and it was a memorable experience.”

Head Coach Jim Schwartz didn’t endorse trading or keeping the pick, but instead said the organization would be open to anything.

Schwartz: “I think that whether you keep the second pick or whether you trade down, it doesn’t change what you have to do and that’s make good decisions in the draft. We mentioned Louis Delmas before; there’s not many players in the draft last year that right now we would trade Louis Delmas for and he was a top pick of the second round. There are blue chip players available in a lot of different spots in the draft.

“We drafted a starting linebacker in the middle of the third last year in DeAndre Levy from Wisconsin. So, whether you trade down and get more picks (or) whether you move up, it’s more about identifying the players and getting the players to fit what you do, rather than getting more picks and things like that. More picks aren’t useful if you don’t use them wisely.”

When it comes to using those picks wisely, Schwartz has an advantage over many head coaches in that he has a scouting background.

Schwartz: “I think every coach is focused on winning on Sunday and that’s about as far as you look ahead. You want to do everything you can to win that game and coaches, for the most part, don’t look long-term. Our goal every week should be to win that game, but there’s also a lot of other things that you need to manage.”

Because of his scouting perspective, Schwartz tends to base his decisions beyond the immediate or upcoming season and instead look toward the development of young players and the team as a whole.

Schwartz: “(You are) making sure that your team is going to be good next year and the year after and things like that because not every decision in this league is short term, so I think that background definitely helped in that. I’m not a very patient guy, but it gives me perspective, it gives me that appreciation for that perspective when it comes to building a team.”

Head Coach Jim Schwartz was asked about those two players on Thursday at the NFL Scouting Combine. It was proposed that, regardless of which player St. Louis selects at No. 1, the Lions would at least be sure to get a quality defensive tackle at No. 2.

Though Schwartz agreed that Detroit would, in fact, get a quality player, he doesn’t want to stop at the defensive tackle position.

Schwartz: “(Let’s not say), ‘We have to take a defensive tackle or we have to take (a specific) position.’ Last year at this time were saying sort of the same kind of thing. ‘Hey look, we’re not saying that we’re definitely drafting a quarterback. Let’s let the whole thing play out – let’s get the best player. If that happens to be a quarterback then that’s good.’

“We could probably say the same thing with defensive tackle. Let’s not make our mind up right now, let’s let everything play out. Let’s let all the information be brought, let’s make a good decision on that. But regardless, we need to find a good player for us at that spot.”

Here are the dates for those two events as well as other important dates for this offseason:

Feb. 24-March 2 — NFL Scouting Combine

Feb. 25 — Deadline for designating franchise players.

March 5 — Free agency begins

March 15 — Detroit Lions report for voluntary offseason conditioning program

March 21-24 — Annual owners meeting

Early April — 2010 regular season schedule announced

April 22-24 — 2010 NFL Draft

After the first two weeks of the season, injuries plagued different starters week-to-week, making it difficult for his young skill players to develop as a unit.

Linehan: “Of the pieces that we have, we’ve got a ways to go there because we were never able to consistently have Matthew (Stafford) and Calvin (Johnson) working together. We had our ups and downs with both of them staying healthy.”

This offseason will be big for Stafford and the other members of last year’s draft class. Players don’t report to their teams until the first week of May and then they can’t come back for the offseason program until late May depending on their college’s graduation date.

That leaves rookies with approximately five weeks of total offseason work, something that makes transitioning into the NFL that much harder.

For a quarterback in particular, getting that time with teammates to gel together is invaluable.

Linehan: “It’s him building a relationship with players and getting that trust factor. It’s still going to be valuable to him building his rapport with the offensive line, Brandon (Pettigrew), the backfield – all those guys.”

Working together, going over specific play types and just getting a feel for one another will undoubtedly have tangible results in 2010.

Though players are coming off injuries, the lone factor of having this time to work with the coaching staff is still beneficial.

Additionally, both the players and coaches will be working with one another having already spent a season together. Last year, the majority of the coaching staff was new as well.

Linehan: “I’m excited about the second go-round because you’re not putting together a playbook working with guys you’ve never worked with. Having that continuity going into this offseason and knowing what we have and knowing where we’ve got to get to be at a different level than we were a year ago – that’s exciting.”

The week started off rough, but smoothed out as the days went on.

Schwartz: “Anytime you take this many players from different schemes, different parts of the country, bring them all together and have one meeting going out to practice, there’s going to be some rough edges that need to be ironed out. I think the guys got a better understanding as the week went on and were able to show themselves better.

“By the time we got to Wednesday and Thursday they really practiced well and didn’t make very many mistakes and things like that.”

Schwartz, his coaching staff and the Lions’ front office have been meeting on a daily basis throughout the week to discuss players on both teams.

Instead of it being like draft preparation, it is more like training camp evaluation, says Schwartz. Coaches and administrators and walking through players from both teams to talk about what they did well and what they didn’t on a practice-by-practice basis.

Schwartz: “It’s just a good week to evaluate – it’s a good week to be around the players. You’re not just in practice with them, you’re not just in the meeting rooms with them – you’re at social events with them, you’re at media events with them.

“You see them first thing in the morning and you see them late at night. So by the time the week’s over, you get a really good feel for each guy, not just as a player, but as a person and the way he handles his business.”

Coverage of the 2010 Senior Bowl will begin at 3 p.m. ET on NFL Network with the game beginning at 4 p.m. ET.

While Linehan has been working with Central Michigan QB Dan LeFevour, Oregon State QB Sean Canfield and Cincinnati QB Tony Pike from the North squad, he has also taken a look at the South squad quarterbacks in Jarrett Brown (West Virginia), Zac Robinson (Oklahoma State) and Tim Tebow (Florida).

During his interview on Sirius, Linehan was asked about tinkering with the mechanics of these players this week.

Linehan: “I think the things with what people are saying about Tim or Tony – those guys are going to get better at it because they’re great athletes and they’re great competitors. They understand that there are certain things that they’ve got to improve on that maybe they haven’t been working on to this point because of a different type of system or something like that.

“But you start with the fact that they’re winners and they’re great players and they win a lot of football games – that’s the fun part is getting them better at some of the fine points in their game.”

In addition to the college players Linehan is working with this week, he was asked about Detroit Lions quarterback Matthew Stafford and his development throughout the 2009 season.

Linehan: “I was real proud of Matt his year. This only disappointing part about his season was the injuries. We’ve got to get that in the past and keep him upright and do those things. Somebody asked me the other day the question about rookies coming into the locker room and all that, I said, ‘Certain guys get it and Matthew is one.’ He was the No. 1 pick, highly touted, highly paid, all those things, but he came in and was just one of the guys and he didn’t try to be anybody but himself. We respond to that.”

Linehan says Stafford’s ability to walk into the locker room and be “one of the guys” really showed up with his grit and toughness.

The most memorable game for Lions fans is Detroit’s win over Cleveland in which Stafford rallied the team with five touchdowns to win in the final play.

Linehan: “I think everybody knew he was, but it’s extremely off the chart. That’s the kind of guy you rally around. He drags himself up off the turf and he’ll play with anything. We basically had to shut him down – he would have kept playing, but he was really banged up. He’s got the skill set, he’s got the mindset, got the great leadership kind of aura about him. I just think he’s going to be a fantastic player.”

Also discussed was Detroit’s offense and how it will respond in 2010 after spending a year in Linehan’s system.

While Linehan says things won’t “be easy” by any stretch, the fact that the players are familiar with both him and the scheme will prove beneficial.

Linehan: “We do have a couple pieces in place that we can rally around. If we continue to build around those, improve on things that weren’t good enough, continue to build on some of the things that we’re happy with – with a young team, with a young quarterback that you believe in and a great receiver like Calvin – I think we’re only going to get better.”

Listen to Linehan’s full interview on Sirius NFL Radio

Schwartz was more pleased with day two of practice after the players struggled to get things down in day one.

Schwartz: “They made a big jump from yesterday to today and hopefully we’ll make a big jump from today to tomorrow. We didn’t have meeting time before this morning’s practice, so we had to install a bunch yesterday – it’s just part of the game.”

Though Schwartz and his staff are preparing for a game on Saturday, practice methods are slightly different than they normally would be for game preparation.

Because this game is so closely tied with player evaluation, players are rotated through different positions and put through more individual drills to better see their skill set.

Schwartz: “You want to install enough to see how well they learn and see them in different situations, but the one thing you don’t want to do is overload them.”

In his interview with Sirius, Schwartz was asked whether he had studied the crop of defensive linemen coming out in this year’s NFL Draft.

Schwartz says he makes a point not to pre-evaluate players because he doesn’t want it to skew what he thinks when seeing them practice.

Schwartz: “A lot of times if you pre-judge – if you already say, ‘Hey, this is what the player is’ – you don’t accept (his performance at face value) in a game like the Senior Bowl. You say, ‘Well, he looks good in this, but I don’t think he’s very good.’ Or, ‘Hey, I think he’s really good’ and then you excuse him not doing so well in a game like this.

“I try to keep an open mind – let these games stand on their own – and then circle back and really get a good evaluation after watching them in a game like this.”

Listen to the full Sirius interview