Is the fifth-year option still a viable option for team building?
The Athletic Football Show: A show about the NFL
The Athletic
4.6 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 6 May 2026
⏱️ 57 minutes
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Summary
The 2023 Draft class is proving to be a conundrum at the fifth-year option milestone. Bryce Young, CJ Stroud, and Bijan Robinson highlight some of the players with exercised options. But why did the Detroit Lions choose not to exercise Jack Campbell's option? And what can the NFL's decisions around this class tell us about the state of fifth-year options as a whole? Robert Mays and Dave Helman discuss some of the key names and teams on this episode of The Athletic Football Show.
Host: Robert Mays
Co-Hosts: Derrik Klassen and Dave Helman
Executive Producer: Michael Beller
Senior Producer: Katy Duffy
Social Producer: Scott Krinch
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Follow Dave on Bluesky: @davehelman.bsky.social
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to the Athletic Football Show. |
| 0:02.0 | I'm Robert Mays. |
| 0:03.0 | Today we're digging into fifth year options for the 2023 draft class. |
| 0:08.0 | The deadline was last week, but there were some notable decisions that were made around this year's 50-year option crop, especially a guy like Jack Campbell. |
| 0:16.3 | The Lions decided not to pick up his option despite him being an all-pro last year. |
| 0:20.1 | We know the reasons for that. |
| 0:21.6 | Linebackers are lumped in with edge rushers. |
| 0:23.3 | It pumps up the value of that position. |
| 0:25.5 | Makes a team like the Lions a little bit more hesitant to pick up that option, similar |
| 0:29.0 | to what happened with Tyler Linderbaum last year. |
| 0:31.6 | So we wanted to use the Jack Campbell News and that conversation just as an entry point |
| 0:37.1 | into the 2023 class and what it tells us about |
| 0:40.3 | 50-year options in general. There are half a dozen, even more players in this group that I think |
| 0:46.4 | are notable touch points that allow us to just discuss where the fifth-year option practice is |
| 0:52.0 | in the NFL period. So that's what me and Dave did today. |
| 0:55.4 | We looked at the 2023 draft, |
| 0:57.5 | the choices the teams made around these 50-year options, |
| 0:59.9 | and what it can tell us about the state of the 50-year option, |
| 1:04.1 | considerations and discussions in the NFL right now. |
| 1:07.9 | So let's get to it right now. |
| 1:19.2 | Okay. in the NFL right now. So let's get to it right now. We're a few days late on this, but we were talking about, we're talking last week about some |
| 1:24.1 | the things we wanted to dig into now that we were in the off season. |
... |
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