The official start of the new league year and free agency is one week away, and that's when the retooling of Detroit's 2025 roster can officially begin for Lions general manager Brad Holmes and head coach Dan Campbell.

Holmes said after the season his goal in free agency is to first focus on re-signing his own players, reiterating that at the NFL Scouting Combine last week. The Lions have recently signed some core pieces to big extensions ( Jared Goff , Amon-Ra St. Brown , Penei Sewell and Alim McNeill) with more potentially coming due this offseason and in the near future with players like Aidan Hutchinson , Kerby Joseph, and Jameson Williams .

That might limit how big of players Holmes and the Lions pursue in the unrestricted free-agent market, but there could be room under the cap to do both. The NFL increased the salary cap for the 2025 season by $23.8 million to $279.2 million per team, which gives general managers like Holmes some added flexibility.

"There are a lot of decisions that we have to make because we're at the point, we're at the juncture with our roster right now that we have identified a lot of young core pieces that we want to keep around and unfortunately that's the tough part is that you got to make decisions on other players contractually that you might not be able to keep that you want to keep," Holmes said at the Combine last week.

"So it's not more so due to you don't want to have the players anymore but you just can't have everybody."