NFL executives, coaches and scouts still regard the Detroit Lions as home to one of the deepest safety tandems in football — even as both members of it spend the summer working back from injury.
In the final installment of ESPN’s annual position rankings, Jeremy Fowler’s survey of league personnel placed Brian Branch fourth among NFL safeties and Kerby Joseph ninth. Both slipped from a year ago, when Branch ranked second and Joseph fifth, and in each case the reason traces back to the same place: availability.
The respect is not in question. “Versatility, toughness, smarts — he’s a complete player,” a passing game coordinator told Fowler of Branch. “He’s a baller when healthy. He’s got elite instincts.” A scout put Joseph’s range plainly: “He finds the ball. It’s hard to find guys with post range like him who can play over the top.” Fowler noted that Joseph has 20 interceptions and 35 pass deflections in 52 career games, and that in 2025 he defended four of the eight passes thrown into his area — a 50.0% ball-hawk rate that led all safeties, per NFL Next Gen Stats.
The health picture is where it gets complicated. Branch tore his Achilles against the Cowboys in early December and is expected to miss at least the first month of the season; the encouraging part is that he has not hit any setbacks in his recovery, though Detroit may hold him out of Week 1 rather than rush him. Joseph’s situation is murkier. He is managing a knee condition that head coach Dan Campbell has described as something that won’t be “necessarily going away,” and the Lions shelved him this spring to limit the wear.
“I don’t know. I honestly do not know,” Campbell said this offseason when asked how the knee would respond to game action. “We’ve done everything we can do, and he’s done everything he can do to this point. And we are trying to be as smart as we can and not push this until we absolutely have to.”
There is a business layer, too. Joseph is a year into a new extension, and a $16.6 million option bonus is due in 2027. How his knee holds up this fall may shape both Detroit’s secondary and its cap sheet. For a team that slid from 15-2 to out of the playoffs a year ago, getting these two on the field matters more than where they rank.
