Tonight, Steffon Diggs will make his long-awaited debut in the Super Bowl with the New England Patriots, and all Buffalo Bills fans can do is watch in agony.
To be fair to Diggs, it’s less so because he’s in the Super Bowl than because he’s there with the Patriots of all teams. Diggs’ olive branch extension, expressing some love back to Bills Mafia, wasn’t exactly received kindly.
But whether you forgive Diggs for his part in leaving the Bills’ wide receiver corp in disarray or not, Diggs, in short order, showed the Bills what they’d been getting wrong, even when Josh Allen had the talented receiver at his disposal.
Stefon Diggs and the Patriots taught the Bills a painful lesson on their way to the Super Bowl
It’s not at all lost on Bills fans that Stefon Diggs isn’t exactly the missing player who got the Patriots back to the Super Bowl. The quick emergence of MVP runner-up Drake Maye and the hiring of Mike Vrabel were much bigger catalysts in revoking the Patriots' brief stay away from the NFL limelight.
Still, the 32-year-old receiver was a reliable target for his young quarterback. He is a piece of the puzzle for New England.
While Patriots detractors can point toward the soft regular season schedule New England faced and the freebie in the AFC Championship against Jarrett Stidham, it’s not as though anyone can deny that the Patriots have built a complete team around Maye with a blazing quickness that should have all of Bills Mafia jealous.
In each of the past two seasons, the Patriots finished 4-13, and now they walk into a Super Bowl as massive underdogs despite ranking in the top half of the league in every meaningful category save for redzone conversion rate on both sides of the ball and defensive takeaways.
It speaks to the quality coaching from Vrabel and the roster building of VP of player personnel Eliot Wolf to surround Maye with an excellent mixture of exciting young talents like Will Campbell and TreVeyon Henderson and veteran experience with players like Diggs and Hunter Henry.
Mind you, it’s not as though Allen has been void of help his entire time in Buffalo. Brandon Beane gave Josh Allen several top-tier defenses, an elite offensive line with an even better rushing attack in 2025. He also gave Allen Diggs in the first place.
But Beane also took him away, and hasn’t found a suitable replacement yet. Curtis Samuel, Joshua Palmer, and Keon Coleman were hopeful prospects, but each has fallen short of being anywhere close to a reliable target across an entire season. Quick band-aids like Brandin Cooks, Amari Cooper and the return of Gabe Davis were just that, band-aids. Not nearly enough to solve the surgical wound-sized issue that is the Bills' wide receiving corps.
And unfortunately for Beane, that issue is one he created.
"These moves are never easy -- very hard, not made overnight, anything like that -- but any time you make a move like this, as I said, very difficult, you're doing it because you're trying to win," Beane said after trading Diggs to the Houston Texans in 2024. "Sometimes people may not see that. This is by no means the Bills giving up or trying to take a step back or anything like that. Everything we do, we're trying to win, and we're going to continue to do that.”
Win, the Bills have since that statement, but not when it matters most. The team reached the AFC Championship that season, but they still took a step back in 2025.
Credit where it’s due, after a chaotic start to this offseason in Buffalo, the Bills seem to have made a wise long-term decision in hiring Joe Brady as head coach. But how much does that reset the Super Bowl clock? A 36-year-old first-time head coach isn’t typically the leading candidate to lead his team to a Super Bowl on paper.
Vrabel already had the advantage with his experience in Tennessee. Everyone knew it was a matter of time before the Patriots would be contenders again when he was hired, but he turned the team around in one season. Brady doesn’t even have to continue a rebuild, so should he be held to a standard that would suggest that he can lead this Bills squad past the postseason brick wall they keep crashing into?
The Patriots showed the Bills that it only takes one offseason to turn something that might be special into the real thing. They showed that when you have the quarterback and coach in place, you can’t waste time giving them exactly what they need to be successful. Now Beane has to take that lesson and apply it.
Beane has a ton of pressure riding on this offseason. The Mafia expects a move or series of moves that can change their fortunes as quickly as the Patriots did. But like Diggs to New England, it’s not about making some ridiculous splash trade or free agent pickup. It’s not even about replacing Diggs. It’s about acquiring proven talent across the board who know how to be a difference-maker when the lights are on, as well as the coaches who put them in the right spot to do just that.
His moves in recent years haven’t reflected that. But the moves in New England clearly have.