The Bills swung the deal of the first week of the NFL’s free agency period, landing receiver Stefon Diggs via trade with the Minnesota Vikings.
Buffalo’s offense gets better with such a talent, but some folks think the price was too high for Diggs. Among those is NBC Sports’ senior writer Peter King.
Here’s what he laid out in his weekly Monday column:
Bills overpaid for Stefon Diggs. I like Diggs a lot, but he’s not the game-changer that Hopkins is, and Buffalo traded, in effect, a one, four and five for him. Pretty rich, I thought, particularly in a year when so many top receivers will be there for Buffalo, who entered the week picking 22, 54 and 86.
Essentially what King is saying is that the Bills overpaid for Diggs because of the DeAndre Hopkins trade that also went down during the opening of free agency. In that deal, the Texans sent their stud wideout and a fourth-round draft pick to the Cardinals for oft-injured All-Pro running back David Johnson and a 2020 second-round draft pick as well as a 2021 fourth-round draft pick.
But there’s things to consider here. First, the Texans don’t have a general manager. Head coach Bill O’Brien is conducting the roster management for the Texans for the time being and this trade screams of a coach disliking a player and just wanting to get rid of him. It appeared very much to be a short-sighted move.
In addition, there’s much deeper financial implications here. Diggs is now a Bill because he didn’t like the Vikings. That’s all. Hopkins and O’Brien reportedly butt heads, but that’s just the start. Now Hopkins wants a new deal reportedly near $20 million a season.
Hopkins is a special player, but so is Diggs and his cap hit near $12 million through the next few seasons. Diggs doesn’t want a new deal from a new team, he just wanted a new team.
Plus, King should know better, just because a wide receiver class is “deep” it does not mean the wideout the Bills hypothetically pick would pan out.
For those who forgot, the 2004 draft class was said to be among the deepest quarterback classes in NFL history. Some selections from that draft classes included Eli Manning, Phillip Rivers, Ben Roethlisberger and JP Losman.
We know which of those did not pan out. The Bills used their first-round pick to land a player who is already proven. Not a bad idea.
Playing devil’s advocate for the NBC Sports analyst though, the Bills could’ve been in a place with the No. 22 overall pick where perhaps a prime prospect was there for the taking. Now we’ll have to wait and see who exactly is there at No. 22 at the end of April, and then we’ll check back in a couple years from now to see if those prospects panned out or not.
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