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After posting a career-best season in 2022, wide receiver Donovan Peoples-Jones saw his role steadily decline this season for the Cleveland Browns.
He will now get the chance to turn his year around as a member of the Detroit Lions.
As ESPN’s Eric Woodyard reported, the Lions landed Peoples-Jones in an October 31 trade with the Browns in exchange for a 2025 sixth-round pick. After the deal was completed ahead of Tuesday’s trade deadline, Lions head coach Dan Campbell spoke about the move and what Peoples-Jones will offer the team.
Homecoming for Donovan Peoples-Jones
As the Lions team website noted, it will be a homecoming for Peoples-Jones as he is a Detroit native and played college football at Michigan. The Lions had an opening after Marvin Jones Jr. left the team for personal reasons, and Campbell said Peoples-Jones would be a good insurance policy in case anyone else goes down.
“I always feel like you’re one injury away,” Campbell said. “That was a position we felt like if we could find a steady, reliable guy that fits us that could play outside that was something that we wanted to look and see if we could acquire.
“DPJ (People-Jones) out there we felt like really fit us. He fits our style. He’s smart and he can play multiple positions. He plays everything for them out there. We just feel like he’ll be a good fit.”
DPJ’s Struggles in Cleveland
Peoples-Jones came into the NFL as a sixth-round pick of the Browns in the 2020 NFL draft. He had a total of 1,740 yards and eight touchdowns through his first three seasons, including a career-best 61 catches for 839 yards and three touchdowns last year. But he has struggled in 2023, making just eight catches for 97 total yards.
As Chris Pokorny of SB Nation’s Dawgs by Nature noted, Peoples-Jones saw his role diminishing in Cleveland as he played 83% of snaps in the team’s October 29 loss to the Seattle Seahawks but had no targets.
Insiders speculated that the Lions could make other moves at the trade deadline, especially for their injury-struck secondary, but the team decided to largely stand pat outside of the addition of Peoples-Jones. The Lions had been hit with a series of injuries in the secondary, losing safety C.J. Gardner-Johnson and cornerback Emmanuel Moseley to long-term injuries.
General manager Brad Holmes said the team looked around quite a bit, but said some of the more far-fetched trade speculation had no real basis in reality.
“A lot of these names that you might see pop up, they look good in the media, and they are names, but that’s often – it’s not reality,” Holmes said, via USA Today’s Lions Wire. “Those same names that you see pop up, when you start getting into conversation, it just doesn’t work out for the best for us.
So, every team has a different plight, every team is in different place, different direction, different phase in their team building, but no, there’s nothing that we leave unturned or ignored or anything. We look at every position, we look at everything and this was the best one for us.”
