The situation between the Bills and receiver Stefon Diggs seemingly reached critical mass during the 2023 mandatory minicamp, when the Bills acted as if Digg stormed out before admitting that they’d asked him to leave. In lieu of trading him then and there, the two sides tried to stay together for another season.
In hindsight, they probably shouldn’t have.
“Last year, I was in the worst mental space I’ve been in since I’ve been in the league,” Diggs told Clay Skipper of GQ. “If I’m not in a good space, obviously that’s not the best for me. So that’s when things had to start shaking out.”
It didn’t seem that it was going badly, at first. Through six games last year, Diggs had 620 receiving yards with five 100-yard performances. He didn’t have more than 87 yards in any game after that. While the shift in offensive coordinator from Ken Dorsey to Joe Brady can easily be blamed for the decline, Diggs started to dip in the four games before Dorsey was fired.
“You can’t roll out of bed and get 800 yards in the first eight games,” Diggs said of his early-season performance. “Your best receiver’s doing that. You tell me about the last 10. What changed? Were there changes going on? I just pay attention to what really happened and not what people try to act like happened. Like, for the last 10 games, I forgot how to fucking play football?”
Something happened. And if Diggs was, as he says, in the “worst mental space” of his NFL career, it’s possible something happened behind the scenes that became the straw that, for him, broke the camel’s back and, for them, resulted in a de-emphasis of Diggs in the passing game.
Regardless, he has now been traded again, for the season time in his career.
“None of those teams wanted to get rid of me,” Diggs told Skipper. “Things had to shake because I kind of wanted them to shake.”
In Minnesota, a tweet posted on the same day Kirk Cousins received an extension resulted in Diggs’s first trade. In Buffalo, he knew it was coming.
“We had some talks with Buffalo,” Diggs said. “We knew where things were going — I did, at least. The outside world had so much speculation. I knew, from the beginning of the year to the end of the year to the offseason, exactly what was going on. Not too much confusion on my end.”
To his credit, Diggs won’t talk about specific problems at this past stops.
“I’m a professional,” Diggs told Skipper. “I believe in professionalism. You don’t gotta talk bad about your ex-girlfriend to your new girlfriend.”
The real question for Diggs is whether his latest new girlfriend will have that title for more than a year. The Texans wisely re-did his deal to make it a contract year. He’ll be a free agent in March. That gives him every reason to have a big year before either re-signing with the Texans or going wherever he wants to go next.
Which probably won’t be back to Buffalo.