Bills GM highlights $31,000,000 consideration in surprise Stefon Diggs trade to Texans
The Buffalo Bills shocked the NFL world by trading Stefon Diggs to the Houston Texans. The wide receiver's exit came after the Bills cut their salary down amid a veteran overhaul.
Several players were cut, but Diggs got traded. Trading the top wide receiver on a team is always a difficult thing to do, and Bills GM Brandon Beane opened up about the choice.
He said there were a lot of factors to consider when weighing the future of a player of Diggs' caliber.
“I don’t need to go through all the reasons why we decided to go ahead and do that," Beane said. "From a cap standpoint, we decided to go ahead and eat it now. We think we can compete and do what we need to do by eating it now." [via The Athletic].
They decided to eat the $31 million in dead capital owed to the Diggs release and move on. They could have gotten fancy with the cap and deferred some of it, but that can make it a little more challenging to manage in the future.
"If we didn’t, if we tried to split it up in too many different ways, now it’s like an albatross just hanging on your neck all year," Beane added. "You look at your cap and you’re going look at how much money we still have dead.”
Diggs' contract was large and the Bills think they can withstand the loss of that money and still compete and win this year. Whether or not they can remains to be seen.
How many games are Texans primed to win with Stefon Diggs as WR1?
Sportskeeda's 17-game NFL simulation predicted how the season would go. With Stefon Diggs in town, the Houston Texans, who were already a playoff team in the first year of the C.J. Stroud era, can get even better.
After simulating 17 games for the Texans, they finished 11-6 and made the playoffs as the third seed in the AFC. They won their division as a result of that record, so the Stefon Diggs trade improved them a little bit.