Week 11 NFL Moneyline Underdogs
Mike Randle
After rumors about a move had been floating just under the surface for much of the offseason, the Buffalo Bills made the huge move Wednesday, sending veteran WR Stefon Diggs to the Houston Texans in a deal that involved multiple picks, primarily a 2025 second-rounder coming to the Bills. The full trade, per ESPN’s Adam Schefter:
Diggs, who turned 30 in November, made the Pro Bowl in each of his four seasons in Buffalo, leading the league with 1,535 yards in 2020 and averaging 111.3 receptions and 1,343.0 yards per season as a Bill. He has five career top-10 fantasy finishes among receivers – each of the last four years (WR9, WR4, WR7, WR3) and a WR10 finish with the Vikings in 2018. Over the last four years, only Tyreek Hill (1,349.0) and Davante Adams (1,303.6) had more PPR points among receivers than Diggs’ 1,204.5, and only eight total receivers were over 1,000.
All that said, Diggs had a pretty miserable end of 2023 by his standards. He was the WR2 in fantasy through Week 6, averaging 8.2 receptions and 103.3 yards per game with 5 touchdowns, but didn’t have another hundred-yard game the rest of the season and only scored three more times, the WR27 from Week 7 to the end of the season. It didn’t get better in the postseason, as Diggs caught 10 passes on 17 targets for 73 scoreless yards in the Bills’ two playoff games, a far cry from WR1-level output.
Still, there’s more than enough in Diggs’ resume to convince fantasy drafters he’s not done, and now he’ll get to take those skills to Houston, where he joins what is now a stacked receiver room with Nico Collins, Tank Dell, Noah Brown and Robert Woods to catch passes from 2023 Offensive Rookie of the Year C.J. Stroud. The Texans might now have the best receiver room in football, and with Stroud, re-signed TE Dalton Schultz and a backfield headed up by fellow trade acquisition Joe Mixon, it’s not hard to argue they might the best offense in the game.
That should lead to more scoring opportunities for Diggs and the rest of the Texans. On the other hand, the ball is surely to be spread around among all that weaponry. Diggs has been drafted as a mid- to high-WR2 in the earliest fantasy drafts, and that now seems like his best-case ceiling. There are just too many high-end mouths to feed in Houston, and Diggs, who turns 31 in November, might not be the No. 1, or if he is it won’t be by a wide margin.
All that said, Stroud now has an argument to be taken even higher. After a rookie season that included 4,108 passing yards and 23 touchdowns, he now gets to throw to an elite group of pass-catchers (and hopefully a healthy one – Dell and Collins both missed time in 2023, but Diggs played 66 of a possible 67 games in his four years in Buffalo. He was already a mid-range QB1, and while his lack of rushing might keep him from ever being the No. 1 quarterback, he can now go up closer to the top of the heap at the position. That said, the steam from this move likely makes Stroud go overdrafted now – if he floats up to the QB2/QB3 range of drafts, steer clear. But if he’s still available around QB5, that’s solid value.
On the other side of the deal, Diggs’ former quarterback, Josh Allen, now faces the most uncertainty he’s had since his rookie season. With the departures this offseason of Gabe Davis and now Diggs, the Bills’ receiver room is “headlined” by Khalil Shakir and free agent acquisitions Curtis Samuel and Mack Hollins, with TE Dalton Kincaid there as well. That’s not the worst receiver room in the league – not as long as the Chargers are doing whatever they are doing – but it’s far closer to that than it has been in several years.
The Bills are now extremely likely to take a wide receiver in the first round of this month’s draft, if not trade up for the right to do so. But unless they can trade all the way up to the Marvin Harrison/Malik Nabers/Rome Odunze range, whoever they get isn’t a good bet to come even close to the kinds of numbers Diggs has offered. As long as Allen has his legs, he’s a candidate to be the overall QB1, but the job has gotten much harder now, and his floor is lower than it’s been since he first put on his Superman cape.
The biggest winners in Buffalo from this deal are likely Shakir, Samuel and RB James Cook. At least until the draft, Shakir and Samuel shape up to be the team’s top target getters at receiver, and with Allen throwing the ball that’s always a favorable role. Meanwhile, as the team sheds receiving talent, Cook could see his work increase even further, pushing him from a lower-end RB1 to in the thick of the race for the top of the position.
