Daily Norseman
The trade netted the Vikings one of the greatest players in franchise history...not bad, huh?
Stefon Diggs made headlines recently as he was recorded on a boat surrounded by scantily-clad women while brandishing a mysterious pink powder.
While it’s likely not the most damaging thing for a Viking/former Viking to do on a boat, it certainly hasn’t been well-received by the New England Patriots, for whom Diggs has yet to play a down and still may not for a few weeks into the season as he recovers from a torn ACL.
It’s not the first time, and likely not the last, that Diggs has made headlines. On the good side, he caught the Minneapolis Miracle to send the Vikings to the NFC Championship game in January of 2018.
On the other side, Diggs was quoted a year-and-a-half later saying “there’s truth to all rumors” after speculation that he was frustrated with his role in the Minnesota Vikings offense.
Five months later, Diggs was traded to the Buffalo Bills for first, fifth, and sixth-round picks in 2020 and a fourth-round pick in 2021.
In four seasons with the Bills, Diggs caught at least 100 passes in each — including leading the league in receptions (127) and receiving yards (1,535) in 2020. He went over the century mark in receiving yards and caught at least eight touchdown passes in each of the four seasons as well, and the Bills won at least one playoff game in each of those campaigns — including going to the AFC title game in 2020.
It would be hard to argue that the Bills didn’t get all they had bargained for, though like the Vikings, they also decided they’d had enough and shipped the then-30-year-old to the Houston Texans with a sixth-round pick in 2024 and a fifth-round pick in 2025 for a second-round pick in 2025.
NFL trade trees can be complicated, especially when each of the picks in the Diggs trade has a “subsequently traded” notation on Pro Football Reference.
Let’s focus on what we can wrap our brains around, five years later.
The Vikings, who I’d argue have the richest wide receiver history in the NFL — at least since their inception in 1961 — lost a top-10 plate in the team’s record books as far as receiving yards and receiving touchdowns and, at the time, held a top-10 spot in receptions as well.
That can be hard to come back from.
It’s not the first time Vikings fans have had to brace themselves for the fallout from a disgruntled star wide receiver being shipped out. More than a decade and a half earlier, the Vikings sent Randy Moss to the Oakland Raiders for linebacker Napoleon Harris, a first-round pick and a seventh-round pick.
And like this last time, the Vikings used the first pick acquired on a direct replacement — South Carolina speedster Troy Williamson. Harris was a respectable two-year contributor and returned to finish out his career after a year with the...
