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It just doesn’t work with this way. Teams wish it did, but it doesn’t.
Recently, the Buffalo Bills traded for Minnesota Vikings wide receiver Stefon Diggs.
The Bills traded their 2020 first-round pick (No. 22 overall), 2020 fifth-round pick, 2020 sixth-round pick, and 2021 fourth-round pick to the Vikings in exchange for Diggs and a 2020 seventh-rounder pick.
Now you have people wondering if this makes the Bills the favorite in the Post-Tom Brady AFC East.
Man is that a ridiculous premise.
The ridiculous premise isn’t that the Bills have a chance to win the AFC East. They certainly do.
But the concept that a wide receiver is the impetus for some to reason they’re now the favorite is foolish.
NFL football doesn’t work that way people.
Quarterbacks make receivers, receivers don’t make quarterbacks.
Josh Allen has major accuracy issues. How is Diggs going to make that go away?
His completion percentage in his first two seasons in the NFL is 56.3 percent.
And he had similar issues in college.
“He never had a completion percentage higher than 56 percent in either season as a starter (at Wyoming),” wrote NFL.com draft analyst Lance Zeirlein. “His accuracy diminishes greatly when he’s forced to move his feet.”
Will Allen and Diggs have some nice connections this season? Probably. But will Diggs fix the quarterback accuracy problems? Absolutely not.
When I first heard about this trade, the first thing that popped into my head was, “This doesn’t seem like a Sean McDermott move.”
Maybe it’s not. He’s been pretty meticulous with how he’s built the Bills with good drafting and reasonable priced free agents who fit his scheme and culture.
This just doesn’t seem like a McDermott move.
Maybe it’s owner driven.
I heard that picking Allen was something the owners wanted. When you hear that owners are involved with picking a quarterback, it should scare you as a fan. It’s not in their wheelhouse.
But remember, these are the same owners who were blown away by Rex Ryan in an interview and hired him as their head coach after the Jets fired him. That didn’t work out very well with Ryan getting fired by Buffalo after two years.
McDermott is never going to tell us who was behind the Diggs trade, but you have to wonder.
And it’s never a good idea to bring in a diva receiver with a young quarterback. That’s bad mix. The diva can mess up his head demanding the ball all the time.
Also, let’s not forget, Diggs can be petulant. Last year, he made a lot of waves in Minnesota because Kirk Cousins wasn’t getting him the ball enough.
He clearly wanted to be traded.
But did Minnesota GM punish his kvetching by sending him to Buffalo? Look, I like Buffalo. I like Western New York. My company is based in Rochester, but you know some players don’t want to play there. That has been an issues for many years.
And after the trade was announced, it took a while for Diggs to respond on Twitter to the move. He’s usually very active on social media. You have to wonder if the silence for a bit was a statement of some kind.
So everyone needs to hold their horses on anointing the Bills AFC East Champs due to the Diggs trade.
March 27, 2020
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