One of the top remaining free agents has a new home.
Per multiple reports, receiver Stefon Diggs has agreed to terms with the Patriots. It’s a three-year, $69 million deal. Via Adam Schefter of ESPN.com, $26 million is guaranteed.
The structure of the contract will reveal much about the extent of the commitment. The key will be the full guarantee at signing.
With Diggs recovering from a torn ACL suffered during the 2024 season, the deal also could include significant per-game roster bonuses tied to Diggs’s ability to play.
In eight games last year with the Texans, Diggs caught 47 passes for 496 yards and three touchdowns.
The Patriots will become Diggs’s fourth team. He has previously played for the Vikings and Bills before being traded last year to Houston.
Former Dolphins coach Brian Flores sued the NFL and multiple teams (Dolphins, Giants, Broncos, and later the Texans) in February 2022. More than three years later, a federal appeals court has officially taken up the question of whether certain claims will be sent to arbitration controlled by the league or will unfold in traditional, open-court litigation.
An oral argument occurred today. The entire session lasted more than 80 minutes, with many questions from the three-judge panel to which the case was assigned.
We’re currently listening to the entire argument, which has been posted by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.
The losing party will have the right to seek relief before the U.S. Supreme Court. And if the NFL loses, it undoubtedly will. Which will serve only to continue to drag out the case even longer.
Regardless of whether the NFL prevails on its effort to force arbitration, the fact that the NFL can make the straight-faced effort to force all claims made against the league and its teams into arbitration controlled by Commissioner Roger Goodell necessarily slams the brakes on the entire process.
For years.
That’s why, at some point, a broad, comprehensive, and final challenge to this practice is needed. Either it’s fine and dandy for a company to let the CEO be the judge and jury for all disputes involving the company and its workforce, or it’s not.
That’s the question that needs to be resolved, once and for all and for good. By truly neutral and impartial judges, untainted by politics or money or anything other than a fundamental sense of what’s right, and what’s wrong.
Is it right for the CEO of a company to serve as the judge for claims made against the company? Or is there a better and more fair (and/or less unfair) way to do this?
Free agent wide receiver Stefon Diggs visited the Patriots last week, and although he left without a contract, he also reportedly left a favorable impression about how he’s coming along in his recovery from a torn ACL.
Diggs is running full speed, getting more comfortable cutting and changing direction, and ahead of schedule in rehabbing from surgery, according to Mike Reiss of ESPN.
It was just under five months ago that Diggs tore his ACL while playing for the Texans in a Week Eight game against the Colts. Up to that point in the 2024 season, Diggs had 47 catches for 496 yards and three touchdowns through eight games in Houston.
The question is whether NFL teams believe that Diggs, who will turn 32 years old during the 2025 season, can come all the way back from his torn ACL and play at the high level he achieved previously in his NFL career, when he was a 1,000-yard receiver for six straight seasons, two with the Vikings and four with the Bills. That Diggs remains unsigned suggests there are still questions about his ability to play the way he played in his prime.
The Texans have struck a deal with another veteran offensive tackle.
Agent Drew Rosenhaus told reporters that his client Trent Brown has agreed to a one-year deal with Houston. The deal is worth up to $3 million.
The Texans reached a deal with former Jaguar and Viking Cam Robinson earlier this week in a move that should fill the left tackle hole they opened by trading Laremy Tunsil to the Commanders.
Brown could join Blake Fisher in the mix for the starting job at right tackle or serve as a swing tackle this year. He played three games for the Bengals before tearing his patellar tendon last season. He had previous runs as a starter for the Patriots, Raiders, and 49ers with some of his time in New England coming at the same time that Texans offensive coordinator Nick Caley was on the Patriots staff.
Houston’s Derek Stingley Jr. is the highest-paid cornerback in the NFL after signing a new contract with the Texans, and he says what that tells him is the team that took him with the third overall pick in the 2022 NFL draft believes in him.
“It means a lot that they allowed me to go out there with my coaches, and they taught me this game and at this level,” Stingley said. “They believe that I can be somebody to teach the younger people that’s on the team. I’m not going to talk in front of everybody, but I know how to be a great teammate. I guess they believe in that and that is what I believe in.”
Stingley said the contract won’t be on his mind going forward, and his only focus is on being the best player he can be.
“I’m not really going to do anything different, just keep being me,” Stingley said. “It’s time to play football. I’m ready to get back into it. That’s really it. I don’t really think about the contract.”
Several veteran wide receivers remain free agents a week into free agency.
One of those, Stefon Diggs, is coming off a knee injury that cut short his 2024 season.
Diggs is in Foxboro visiting with the Patriots, Chad Graff of TheAthletic.com reports.
The Patriots have been in search of a top option at the position as they currently have Kayshon Boutte, Kendrick Bourne, Demario Douglas and Ja’Lynn Polk atop their depth chart.
Diggs, 31, spent last season with the Texans after a trade from the Bills. He played eight games before a torn ACL, catching 47 passes for 496 yards and three touchdowns.
The timing injury puts his availability for the start of the season in doubt.
Diggs ranks 46th on PFT’s top-100 free agents list. Amari Cooper and Keenan Allen also are on the list and remain free agents.
Diggs went to the Vikings in the fifth round in 2015, and he spent five years in Minnesota followed by four years in Buffalo after a trade. The Bills then traded him to Houston. For the first time, he is a free agent.
He is a four-time Pro Bowler, and he made All-Pro in 2020.
Last year, the Texans signed defensive end Danielle Hunter to a two-year contract. With one year done, they’ve added another.
Via Tom Pelissero of NFL Media: “The #Texans and Danielle Hunter have agreed to a one-year, $35.6 million contract extension that makes him the NFL’s second-highest paid defensive end, per sources. Hunter will make $32M this season — a $12.5M raise — and $55.1M ($54.1M fully guaranteed) over the next two seasons. Deal negotiated by @ZekeSandhu
of @KlutchSports.”
.
As we know, it’s not really a one-year extension. It’s a new, two-year contract. Hunter was due to make $19.5 million in 2025. He’ll now make $55.1 million over the next two years, an average of $27.55 million per year.
Calling Hunter the second highest-paid defensive end is technically accurate under the phony-baloney new-money average, but it’s also a tad disingenuous. Maxx Crosby, at $35.5 million in new-money average on his latest deal, will make $64 million over the next two years, nearly $9 million more than what Hunter will make. Crosby also has a practical guarantee of $91.5 million, $37.4 million more than Hunter. Crosby’s deal is objectively superior to Hunter’s.
But, again, the rules of #scooptown are unflinching. Thou shalt hype the new-money average. (Also, thou shalt specifically grease the agent who did the deal — and who provided the information.)
Hunter had 12.0 sacks for the Texans in 2024. He has 99.5 career sacks. The Texans were clearly happy with his performance, and they were willing to adjust his contract.
The Texans have found a new left tackle.
According to multiple reports, they have agreed to terms with Cam Robinson. Robinson will step into the spot on the Houston offensive line that opened up when they traded Laremy Tunsil to the Commanders earlier this month.
Robinson joined the Vikings in a midseason trade with the Jaguars and started 10 regular season games. He also started Minnesota’s postseason loss to the Rams, but had no spot with the team in 2025 with Christian Darrisaw due back from a knee injury.
Robinson was a Jacksonville second-round pick in 2017, so the Texans saw plenty of him before he made the move to the Vikings. Now they’ll be asking him to protect quarterback C.J. Stroud against his former team and the rest of Houston’s 2025 opponents.
The Texans moved quickly to extend the contract of cornerback Derek Stingley Jr., providing a clear example to all other teams (including the other team in Texas) regarding how things should be done.
We’ve gotten our hands on the full details. Here they are, per a source with knowledge of the terms:
1. Signing bonus: $25 million.
2. 2025 base salary: $1.431 million, fully guaranteed.
3. 2026 base salary: $21.595 million, fully guaranteed.
4. 2026 per-game roster bonus: $500,000.
5. 2027 base salary: $20 million, guaranteed for injury at signing, and fully guaranteed by March 2026.
6. 2027 per-game roster bonus: $500,000.
7. 2028 base salary: $21 million, guaranteed for injury at signing, and fully guaranteed by March 2027.
8. 2028 per-game roster bonus: $500,000.
9. 2029 offseason roster bonus: $1 million.
10. 2029 base salary: $21 million.
11. 2029 per-game roster bonus: $500,000.
The new-money average is $30 million per year on the three new years, and it’s a five-year, $113 million with an average of $22.6 million from signing.
The total guarantee is $89 million, with $48 million fully guaranteed at signing, $68 million fully guaranteed by 2026, and the $89 million vesting by 2027.
The NFL released the list of team-proposed changes to playing rules and bylaws on Wednesday and they include a proposal made by several clubs to change procedures used for footballs used in the kicking game.
Current rules call for those balls — known as K-Balls — to be prepared by teams during a 60-minute window on the day of games with three such balls being delivered to officials for use that day.
In the proposal, the Ravens, Browns, Texans, Eagles, Raiders, Vikings, and Commanders argue that the process “continues to put stress on NFL equipment staffs during the critical pregame period on game days” and calls for a change that would allow the balls to be prepared ahead of time.
NFL rules currently allow for balls used outside of the kicking game to be prepared in advance. The proposal adds that the same pregame inspection process would be applied to both sets of footballs in order to assure that no team is manipulating the balls to their advantage.
Any changes would need to be approved in a vote of all 32 teams with 24 votes needed to pass.
