Picking players for a mock draft can be a mind-bending exercise.

You start with a pool of qualified talent, you try to match fit and personality and traits with team need, and you shuffle players based on whatever rumors you hear.

And when it comes to the Detroit Lions, you can take need out of the equation.

For four years now, Lions general manager Brad Holmes has been clear about his draft philosophy: Take the best available player who fits the team.

He has talked about not having depth charts in his draft room. He wore a “Positional Villain” sweatshirt to drive home the point last year. And history shows, especially early in the draft, he’s a man of his word.

In 2023, Holmes foreshadowed the first-round picks of Jahmyr Gibbs and Jack Campbell when he warned about a month before the draft that teams “can make a lot of mistakes” drafting for need. The Lions traded down from No. 6 to No. 12 in the first round and took Gibbs, a rare top-15 running back, and added Campbell, an off-ball linebacker — another position often pushed down draft boards because of value — six picks later.

Gibbs was one of the NFL’s best running backs last season and a key cog in the league’s highest-scoring offense, and Campbell led the Lions with 131 tackles and was a cornerstone of an improved but injured defense.

Campbell is the only off-ball linebacker to go in the top 20 of the past three drafts, and that fact was lingering in my head as I did my second mock draft this week. Teams don’t value the position quite like they used to; Roquan Smith, the highest-paid inside linebacker in the NFL, averages $20 million per year on his contract, less than the top running back, safety and right guard. And that could cause one of the draft’s more intriguing talents, Jihaad Campbell, to slide to the Lions late in the first round.

Jihaad Campbell isn’t one of the five or six blue-chip players in this draft, but he did a lot of things well in his three seasons at Alabama. He had 117 tackles and five sacks last year. He earned first-team All-SEC honors with is sideline-to-sideline play. And he did it while lining up all over Alabama’s front seven as an off-ball linebacker and pass rusher.

“I feel as though I’m Mr. Can Do It All,” Campbell said at the NFL combine in late February. “I’m a Swiss army knife as they like to say. I can blitz through the A gap, I can come off the edge, I can play middle runner Tampa 2 … I can play man-to-man on a receiver, tight end, running back. Anything.”