Stefon Diggs is gone, but he won’t be forgotten.
It will be hard to forget him, given that he counts for $31 million in dead money under the Buffalo salary cap in 2024.
By trading him before June 1, the Bills will take the full charge in 2024, instead of splitting it up. After June 1, they would have absorbed only $8.849 million this year, with the rest hitting the cap in 2025.
It won’t be impossible to move some cap dollars around, but it would have been cleaner and easier to wait less than two months. It also would have been strategically useful to wait until after the draft.
If, in 22 days, the Bills still had Diggs and if it was generally believed they’d be keeping him, they wouldn’t be so widely viewed as a team in the market for a receiver. Now, as they inch closer and closer to being on the clock, teams picking behind them might be thinking about trying to leapfrog the Bills to get the receiver they think the Bills wants.
It’s possible, if not likely, that the Texans wanted to do it now, so that Diggs will be on the team for the full extent of the offseaon program. If the Bills had no better offers, and if the Texans were going to walk away if the trade didn’t happen now, the Bills had no choice.