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Mitch Albom: Lions begin 2025 season with hope, and a rookie living his childhood dream
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- Mitch Albom: Lions begin 2025 season with hope, and a rookie living his childhood dream
Isaac TeSlaa remembers a Detroit Lions - Green Bay Packers game. The Hail Mary game . You remember it, too, right? Final seconds, Lions winning, 23-20. They tackle Aaron Rodgers for the apparent win, except a face mask penalty gives Green Bay an extra play. Then, on that freebie, Rodgers scrambles like a chased cockroach, gets loose, launches a bomb to the end zone that is somehow caught for a touchdown and wins the game, dropping the Lions to 4-8, and basically sinking any playoff hopes for the season.
"I went to bed," TeSlaa recalls, "and started crying."
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That was 10 years ago.
He was 13.
Playing the Packers in the season opener.
Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends. But it does change. The NFL, like starfish and salamanders, has built-in ways to regenerate itself. Bad teams get high draft picks. Impatient owners hire new coaches and general managers. Free agents come and go. When all that alchemizes correctly, you get what nature and Roger Goodell intended: new limbs. Fresh organs. Bad to good. Maybe even great.
Maybe even … a championship.
We start the 2025 Lions season with high hopes, with old injuries healed ( Aidan Hutchinson , Marcus Davenport ), old faces gone ( Frank Ragnow ), former coaches replaced by up-and-coming ones (John Morton, Kelvin Sheppard ) and new players generating anxious buzz.
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Perhaps no rookie symbolizes that more than TeSlaa, a tall, shaggy-haired wide receiver whose name on draft night drew a deafening "WHO?" from Lions fans — and pretty much everyone else watching.
Can you blame them? Here is a guy who never caught a pass in high school, who barely got recruited, who went to Hillsdale College, a Division II school in Michigan better known for turning out conservative judges and political pundits than NFL players, and who transferred to Arkansas essentially to get noticed .
Brad Holmes noticed. Watched the tape. Watched the Senior Bowl. He didn't speak much about it. Kept his cards close to the vest. But when the draft's third round came, Holmes traded up to pluck the 23-year-old whom he later called "my favorite receiver in this draft."
And when he got TeSlaa on the phone, what he said to him spoke volumes:
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"Hop in an Uber and get over here, man!"
TeSlaa's fandom started with Matthew Stafford
Arkansas wideout Isaac TeSlaa (WO41) during the 2025 NFL Combine at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis on March 1, 2025.
You want to know how far the Lions have come? Isaac TeSlaa is how far. The kid grew up a Lions fan in Hudsonville — "Where the ice cream comes from," he says — but barely remembers the team's lowest point, 2008, when it lost all 16 games.
"I was like 6 years old," TeSlaa says. "All I remember is seeing my dad get angry every Sunday."
For Isaac, Lions World essentially began with the Matthew Stafford era, and while there was plenty of heartache during those years, the regenerative process essentially had begun. After all, no Matt Stafford, no eventual trade for Jared Goff , no trade, no draft picks which turned into Jameson Williams , Jahmyr Gibbs and Sam LaPorta , all of whom helped turn the Lions into a rising franchise that came within a half of making a Super Bowl two years ago, a team that has won 27 of its last 34 regular season games.
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That's the Lions team that TeSlaa knows. The one he wanted to play for, and not just because he grew up down the road.
"I think it's probably the best time to be a part of this Lions organization ," he says. "I think we got a chip on our shoulder, just based on how, you know, the seasons have gone the previous two years and just the opportunity that the team had and kind of let it slip away a little bit. …
"Our team slogan is 'A Reckoning.' And I think that's what we're going to go out and show other teams."
A reckoning. A settling of accounts. A chip on their shoulder.
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The Lions.
Man, times have changed.
TeSlaa taught by his dad
Arkansas Razorbacks wide receiver Isaac TeSlaa (4) scores a touchdown in the first quarter as Western Carolina Catamounts safety Mateo Sudipo (1) defends at War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Sept. 2, 2023.
TeSlaa has been hailed by Lions coaches as tough, fast, a great blocker and a quick study. Holmes and Dan Campbell had enough confidence in him to release veteran receiver Tim Patrick in a roster cut, making TeSlaa potentially the No. 4 receiver after Amon-Ra St. Brown , Williams and Kalif Raymond .
"He just continues to get better and better," Campbell told the media as training camp wrapped up. "He's taking reps with the 1s, he's been in there with Goff, he's had to run good versus good. …
"He's gonna have some growing pains … but I'm very pleased — we're very pleased — with where he's at after six weeks of camp. … I think there's a place for him to help us early in this season."
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Talking to TeSlaa, you quickly understand why he excites his staff. He's affable, smart, easygoing, confident but not cocky, and clearly used to defying expectations. After all, in high school (Unity Christian in Hudsonville), TeSlaa played quarterback on a team with no receivers .
"Our offense had three running backs and two tight ends every single play. We never had a receiver out on the field. I probably threw the ball like, maximum, eight times a game."
While he claims to still be able to heave a 60-yard pass, receiving was always going to be TeSlaa's specialty, mostly because his father played receiver at Hillsdale himself. And Isaac and Mark TeSlaa appear as close as peanut butter on bread.
With three sisters as siblings, Isaac's young life was "surrounded by a lot of Barbie dolls." He gravitated to his dad, and his love of football. The elder TeSlaa wound up a coach at Hudsonville Unity Christian, and father-and-son's pass catching drills were in the mold of Jerry Rice's hill running or Kobe Bryant's "Mamba Mentality" workouts. Every day, summer or winter, they'd spend 45 minutes practicing every type of catch from every type of angle.
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"We even did a thing where I would be jumping on trampoline, and my dad would throw me the ball, and I would try to catch it and do a front flip at the same time."
Has that ever come close to replicating itself in a game, I ask?
"Not yet," TeSlaa says.
THE BACKSTORY: How Isaac TeSlaa transformed from no-star recruit to one of NFL draft's biggest sleepers
Can TeSlaa add fairy-tale ending?
American team wide receiver Isaac TeSlaa of Arkansas (1) makes a two point catch with defense from National team defensive back Johnathan Edwards of Tulane (11) during the first half of the 2025 Senior Bowl football game against the National team at Hancock Whitney Stadium in Mobile, Alabama, on Feb. 1, 2025.
By the way, about that name. Isaac knows everyone struggles with it. It's not pronounced like the car (the accent is on the second syllable and it's more like "aw" than "ah"). But even he's not sure of the origin.
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"I've looked it up in Google and it said, like, Slovakian, or something. But my family is very Dutch. My grandpa was born in the Netherlands and immigrated. A lot of people in the west Michigan area are Dutch.
"I grew up in Hudsonville. It's a small town, for sure. Everyone knows us because of the ice cream. (Hudsonville ice cream has been around since 1926.) I ate a lot of ice cream growing up. Being Dutch, we had a dessert after every single dinner."
Wait. Is that a Dutch thing, I ask?
"It might be. Or maybe that was just my parents trying to convince themselves it was OK to have dessert every night."
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So he's funny, too. And proud of being from Michigan. TeSlaa recently had an ice cream sundae named after him at a Hudsonville shop called The Little Dipper Café. The name of his specialty is "Open on Sundae."
Get it?
So let's see. An ice cream kid from small-town Michigan who never caught a high school pass and went to Hillsdale for two years has made the Lions roster and excited his coaches. And Hutchinson is back. And the defense is healthy. And the staff is different but the coach and GM are still steering the ship. And like starfish and salamanders, the team needs to shed the scars of last year's playoff upset and regenerate a new story.
It all begins when Detroit goes to Lambeau Field to face the Packers, who just acquired superstar defensive end Micah Parsons and are now being favored by some experts to beat out the Lions for the NFC North crown.
Detroit Lions wide receiver Isaac TeSlaa makes a catch against the LA Chargers during the first half of the Hall of Fame Game at Tom Benson Hall of Fame Stadium in Canton, Ohio on Thursday, July 31, 2025.
Could the stars align more perfectly?
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"I can't wait," says TeSlaa, the kid who cried when Rodgers threw that Hail Mary pass. "I grew up with some Packers fans and they had our number for a while. I've hated the Packers my whole life."
But he loved the Lions, and now he is one. And, most importantly, he thinks he lucked out by joining a winner.
Welcome back my friends, to the show that never ends, a show that never gets old, because it constantly gets young. The "Reckoning "begins Sunday afternoon. Hop in an Uber and get over here.
More: Mitch Albom: Interview with Billy Joel still resonates many years later
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Contact Mitch Albom: malbom@freepress.com . Check out the latest updates with his charities, books and events at MitchAlbom.com . Follow him @mitchalbom .
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This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Detroit Lions rookie Isaac TeSlaa living his childhood dream
