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 Chiefs. The seventh-round pick was used to select Adrian Ward, who doesn’t even have a Pro Football Reference page.
In Minnesota sports annals, it ranks somewhere in the mix of “Twins trade Johan Santana for driftwood,” “Timberwolves trade Kevin Garnett for flotsam” and probably just shy of “Vikings trade more picks than prime Brett Favre can throw for Herschel Walker.”
And how’s this for something I just realized: all three of these Vikings trades are separated by (roughly) 15 years.
Is fan-related trauma cyclical in Minnesota? Maybe so.
So it’s understandable why Vikings fans of a certain age were resigned to getting the short end on yet another trade of an unhappy star.
But this time, it was different.
Maybe we’ve sufficiently buried the lede, but Justin Jefferson was selected with the first-round pick at No. 22 overall in 2020. And while Moss “fell” to the Vikings at No. 21 in 1998, it wasn’t exactly the same with Jefferson — though getting a talent of his caliber one spot later in a draft has been a coup with perhaps an even bigger payoff.
That’s not to say that Jefferson has usurped Moss in Vikings history yet. Jefferson is a little over a mile short of Moss’ 9,316 receiving yards in a Vikings uniform (both tenures combined), and still has fewer than half (40) of Randy’s 92 touchdown receptions with Minnesota.
But it’s also undeniable that he’s on the right path.
And while Jefferson doesn’t have to be Moss to justify anything — his place in Vikings history, the Diggs trade or any of it — he’s certainly done more than can be expected.
Here’s how the two compare through their first 77 NFL games:
- Jefferson – 495 receptions, 7,432 receiving yards (96.5 per game), 40 receiving touchdowns
- Moss – 390 receptions, 6,411 receiving yards (83.3 per game), 58 receiving touchdowns
To be sure, it’s not necessarily an apt head-to-head comparison. Moss played in an era where quarterbacks threw many more interceptions per year, and his skill set led to more work far downfield than Jefferson’s has (hence his 16.4-15.0 yards per reception advantage).
But when grading out the Vikings taking Jefferson with the first-round pick acquired in the Diggs trade, a comparison to Moss isn’t necessary.
How about a comparison to Diggs himself?
Both have dealt with injuries that have cost them games during this five-year stretch, so it’s surprising that they’ve played a nearly identical number of games since Jefferson debuted in 2020.
- Jefferson – 495 receptions, 7,432 receiving yards (96.5 per game), 40 receiving touchdowns
- Diggs – 492 receptions, 5,868 receiving yards (79.3 per game), 40 receiving touchdowns
And again, Jefferson has averaged 15.0 yards per reception to Diggs’ 11.9. All of this is in three more games from Jefferson than Diggs (77-74). And as one might remember, the Vikings handled Jefferson with kid gloves to start his rookie season
When was Jefferson’s first big game? Game three of his rookie season, when he caught seven passes for 175 yards in a loss to the Titans. Is that to say this erases the three-game gap between the two? Not necessarily, but less production from a rookie wideout is to be expected no matter how historically good they are when compared to a veteran — especially when said veteran led the NFL in receptions and receiving yards that season.
Either way, it’s hard to say the trade didn’t work out for either side. Josh Allen got a reliable pass-catcher to jump-start his career, while the Vikings have added a superstar of their own who might be on his way to re-writing every record in the team’s receiving history book.
For a trade that was largely met with skepticism, this has been a huge win for the Vikings.