This is an opinion piece by MLive.com reporter Kyle Meinke.

ALLEN PARK -- The Detroit Lions used one of their Day 2 picks on a small-school defender that was so off the radar, so far off everyone’s board, that only the biggest draft degenerates had even heard of him. Of course the arm-chair experts instantly called the pick a reach, and the Twitter mob did its thing. Then Bob Quinn came out and defended the pick, noting he was actually worried somebody else might beat him to the punch. And sure enough, reports later surfaced other teams, including the New England Patriots, had also been interested.

That player: Tracy Walker.

You were expecting Jahlani Tavai, weren’t you? And I don’t blame you, because the parallels are striking. The Lions selected the Hawaii linebacker on Friday night in the second round of the NFL draft, even though every analyst from here to, well, Hawaii, had him as a Day 3 prospect. NFL Network projected him to go in the fourth or fifth round. He was the No. 24 linebacker in the draft and No. 237 player overall according to ProFootballFocus. CBS had him 195th overall. I could go on, but you get the idea.

Point is, this guy was way off the map. Then the Lions took him at 43rd overall, sending the entire Allen Park press room into a frenzy to figure out who exactly he was.

The whole thing played out very much like Walker from last season, the little-known safety from Louisiana-Lafayette. He was a Day 3 prospect that Detroit took in the third round, and the Lions were ripped for reaching. And I think that offers an appropriate cautionary tale for those quick to criticize the Tavai pick, because Tracy Walker wasn’t in Detroit very long before the talent became evident.

He nearly won the San Francisco game in Week 2 with a late interception, except it was waved off by an off-ball penalty by Quandre Diggs. Walker began siphoning snaps away from veteran Glover Quin down the stretch, and would have finished the season as the second-best safety in the game according to ProFootballFocus had he played enough snaps to qualify.

The Lions released Quin after the season, and now Walker is among the favorites to start at safety in Year 2. Not bad for a guy people hated -- hated! -- on draft night. And his emergence offers important context for understanding the Tavai pick.

No, he’s not Devin Bush or Devin White. The Lions could have had Bush too, and then picked another tight end -- say, Irv Smith -- in the second round. But anyone thinking that way is missing the point entirely. The point is, Detroit is completely uninterested in following conventional thinking.

Conventional thinking says Devin Bush is a better player than Jahlani Tavai, and hey, maybe he is. He was taken 10th overall after all. But the Lions also know exactly what they want in a linebacker, and it’s not the undersized Bush. Already locked into guys like Jarrad Davis and Devon Kennard, they wanted -- they felt they needed -- a thick linebacker, like a Dont’a Hightower or a Rob Ninkovich.

They don’t come around that often either. But the Lions saw Tavai, and his 6-foot-2, 250-pound frame, and knew he was exactly the sort of thing they were looking for to complement what they already have.

“(Linebacker) was a position we wanted to address,” Quinn said late Friday night. "Not giving you every detail of what our draft board looks like, but linebackers that play in this defense that are very, very good natural fits – there’s only a couple every year. You wait a year, you don’t get one, you might not get him next year, you might not get him the year after.

"This guy was a guy we had targeted as early as October.”

Tavai started as a freshman on the outside before moving inside the last three years at Hawaii. He was a tackling machine, registering at least 100 tackles as a sophomore and junior, then averaging more than 10 per game as a senior before going down with a shoulder injury after eight games.

He was used on the blitz, and he took on guards, and he lined up on the edge and even dropped into coverage. Anyone paying any kind of attention knows how much Matt Patricia values versatility in his defense. And doing it at 250 pounds really harkens to the thick-bodied linebackers he had at his disposal in New England -- and something he’s never had in his off-ball linebackers in Detroit.

“We like thick, built linebackers – really thick guys that can take on blocks,” Quinn said. "But when they play on the edge, they have enough playing strength and enough arm length to set the edge like where Kennard plays. (Tavai) can go out there against a good tight end, hold the edge of the defense, which is crucially important. Then you see him play off the ball. You play him like ‘J.D.’ or Christian and that’s the versatility.

"It’s just something where these guys are hard to find. Really felt fortunate to be able to get him, because there was some interest in and around our picks that we were getting pretty nervous there for a few picks.”

The best counterpoint against the pick is that the Lions overdrafted Tavai -- that they could have traded back, or even waited until the third round to get a guy almost nobody expected to be taken before the fourth. I can’t disagree with that thinking either. But Quinn wasn’t of that mind. Quinn believes Tavai was valued highly by other clubs as well, and let’s be honest, he was talking about the Patriots.

Detroit and New England are now running basically the same defense. That requires similar players, and we’ve seen their overlap before in free agency and the draft. There were reports last year that New England prized Tracy Walker, for example, but the Lions got to him first. And sure enough, after the shock wore off of the Tavai pick on Friday night, there were reports the Patriots had desired him too.

“Really excited that he was still there,” Quinn said. “There was a lot of interest in him in and around our pick that I think we kind of held on there for about four or five picks, not knowing if he was going be there.”

It’s possible the Lions took Tavai too early. It’s possible he won’t work out at all. But it is becoming increasingly clear they just don’t care about any of that. They are fully committed to the Matt Patricia defense, to their own way of doing things, and they aren’t afraid to go get the guys they need, everything else and everyone be damned.