Stefon Diggs says 2023 was the ‘worst mental period’ of his NFL career

The situation between the Bills and receiver Stefon Diggs seemingly reached critical mass during the 2023 mandatory minicamp, when the Bills pretended to let Digg storm out before admitting they’d asked him to leave. Instead of trading him then and there, the two sides attempted to stay together for another season.

In retrospect, they probably shouldn’t have done that.

“Last year I was in the the worst mental state I’ve been in since I’ve been in the league“, Diggs told Clay Skipper GQ. “If I’m not in a good space, that’s obviously not the best thing for me. So then things had to start shaking.”

Things didn’t look bad at first. In six games last year, Diggs had 620 receiving yards with five 100-yard performances. He hadn’t had more than 87 yards in any game since. While the switch from offensive coordinator Ken Dorsey to Joe Brady can easily be blamed for the decline, Diggs began to decline in the four games before Dorsey was fired.

“You can’t roll out of bed and get 800 yards in your first eight games,” Diggs said of his early-season performance. “Your best receiver does that. Tell me about the last 10. What changed? Were there any changes? I just pay attention to what really happened and not what people try to pretend happened. Like, the last 10 games I forgot how to play the fucking football?”

Something happened. And if Diggs was, as he says, in the “worst mental space” of his NFL career, it’s possible that something happened behind the scenes that was the straw that broke the camel’s back for him and resulted in them de-emphasizing Diggs in the passing game.

Either way, he’s now been traded again, for the season of his career.

“None of those teams wanted to get rid of me,” Diggs told Skipper. “The place had to shake because I wanted them to shake.”

In Minnesota, a tweet posted the same day Kirk Cousins ​​received an extension resulted in Diggs’ first trade. In Buffalo, he knew it was coming.

“We’ve had some conversations with Buffalo,” Diggs said. “We knew where it was going — I did. 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 part.”

Diggs, frankly, doesn’t want to comment on the specific issues that arose during his previous stops.

“I’m a professional,” Diggs told Skipper. “I believe in professionalism. You don’t have to talk bad about your ex-girlfriend to your new girlfriend.”

The real question for Diggs is whether his newest girlfriend will carry that title for more than a year. The Texans wisely re-wrote 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 he re-signs with the Texans or goes wherever he wants to go.

It probably won’t be back to Buffalo again.