Wide Left: The Vikings totally want to trade Stefon Diggs
Diggs flashed a wink in October after being asked about his status in Minnesota.
Blair Anderson is a Vikings superfan who has big opinions about his favorite team. Naturally, BMTN decided it was wise to provide him a blog to release his frustrations. Here's what his latest brainwork came up with.
Minnesota Vikings General Manager Rick Spielman is just like you and I. He puts his shoes and socks on before his pants and once they're on, he makes bold business decisions.
As he enters the 2020 NFL offseason, those decisions are about to be put in an Instapot and cranked up all the way on pressure cooker. The Vikings have no money to spend on free agents and are about to create more holes throughout their starting lineup.
With the team obsessed with keeping Kirk Cousins because "Hey, we could do worse!" Spielman has to find a way to navigate around his $31 million salary and field a competitive team. There are many ways Spielman can go about doing this with aging veterans, but why do that when you can trade someone like Stefon Diggs?
You probably know where this whole Diggs thing is at by now, but to sum things up, Diggs has been posting cryptic stuff on his Twitter page while also showing the social media skills of a angry middle school student who just got grounded.
This has led many to speculate that Diggs is on the market, but ol' Slick Rick had something to say about that during his annual press conference at the NFL Scouting Combine on Tuesday afternoon.
"There is no reason, the rumors or whatever you're talking about, to anticipate that Stefon Diggs is not going to be a Minnesota Viking," he said.
There, that settles it. Nothing to see here, right? I mean an NFL GM wouldn't lie to his fans with a star receiver!
"Percy Harvin is under contract and we expect him, just like all of our players under contract, to be here," Spielman said in 2013, adding that "there is no intent to trade Percy Harvin." - Rick Spielman, who traded Harvin less than a month later.
Well, s***.
Still, most of Spielman's comments make sense. The Vikings offense could really use Diggs because they have nothing behind him and Adam Thielen and ran with four wide receivers last season (if you factor in one of those receivers was Laquon Tredwell, they technically ran with three).
But dig deeper into the comments and you'll see the slight chance that Spielman and Zimmer have had enough of the "business is business" and "I just took down every Viking thing on Instagram lol" posts and are willing to ship him out on the first plane that leaves Minnesota.
The biggest instance came when Spielman was asked if Diggs was actually happy with the Vikings. This is a valid question because Diggs came down with "throw me the damn ball flu" after a Week 4 loss to the Bears. Spielman's response didn't seem to make as much sense.
"Stefon last year had probably his most productive year. He's a young receiver we just extended, and he's a major part of our offense."
In no part of that response did Spielman say, "Yeah, Stefon is just goofing around," or "He's really excited to be in a run-first offense by an archaic coaching staff!" Instead, Spielman used the kind of rhetoric that you use to convince someone that 35-year-old Adrian Peterson is worth a first-round pick in your fantasy football league.
After using similar comments to everyone that would listen at the NFL Scouting Combine, Spielman went ahead and used the one card that would signify this isn't over by blaming the media for doing their job.
In a perfect world, the Vikings would realize that when every single NFL team is calling for the guy you may or may not want to trade, it might be a good idea not to trade him. In reality, we just don't know what's going on as the Vikings try to empty out every couch cushion in TCO Performance Center just to make this team marginally better.
Spielman said all the right things in his mind on Tuesday, but in the next three weeks, we'll find out if he was really telling the truth.
