The Detroit Lions made a minor but interesting move on their practice squad on Tuesday afternoon. The team announced they have released veteran nose tackle Chris Smith and replaced him with rookie nose tackle Aidan Keanaaina.<\/p>\n
Smith is a well-respected player within the building, and even got some early reps in training camp and the preseason. After Smith\u2019s game against the Bengals in August, Lions coach Dan Campbell heaped praise on the 26-year-old defender.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe just does everything right,\u201d Campbell said. \u201cHe does all the little things right. He doesn\u2019t make the same mistake twice. He\u2019s the guy you love to coach because he\u2019s up here all offseason, works his tail off, is always trying to hone his game. He plays disciplined football.\u201d<\/p>\n
Despite a strong preseason, Smith didn\u2019t make the 53-man roster, and he spent the first six weeks on the practice squad without a call-up. Now an undrafted rookie is taking his roster spot.<\/p>\n
Clearly, the length of that injury settlement has passed, and Keanaaina can now continue his development with Detroit. With the Lions lacking a ton of depth at nose tackle, it\u2019s certainly possible he eventually sees the field this season, but it\u2019ll take some time for him to get back into football shape.<\/p>\n
With Keanaaina back in Detroit, he joins five other members of the Lions UDFA class on the roster, including EDGE Eric O\u2019Neill (active roster), quarterback Luke Altmyer, tight end Miles Kitselman (who also returned after his injury settlement expired), EDGE Anthony Lucas, and safety Aamaris Brown.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Detroit Lions made a minor but interesting move on their practice squad on Tuesday afternoon. The team…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1032855,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2071],"tags":[146,113,153,2705,2506,7,147,6],"class_list":["post-1032854","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-detroit-lions","tag-detroit","tag-detroit-lions","tag-detroit-lions-news","tag-detroit-lions-transactions","tag-detroitlions","tag-football","tag-lions","tag-nfl"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/117474699759339257","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032854","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1032854"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1032854\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1032855"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1032854"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1032854"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1032854"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}