After Monday night’s blowout win over the Jaguars, Bills quarterback Josh Allen praised his current group of receivers for not caring about stats or touchdowns. Many saw Allen’s words as a commentary about former Bills receiver Stefon Diggs.
On Wednesday, Allen said he wasn’t taking a shot at Diggs.
“I know there’s a lot of people talking out there, again, I’m not trying to tear down anybody,” Allen said, via Alaina Getzenberg of ESPN.com. “I’ve loved everybody that I’ve played with, and you don’t have to tear other people down to build each other up. And we’re building each other up right now and that’s all we’re trying to do and trying to stay together as a team. We’re really caring about each other and everybody in this building’s got that feeling.”
Allen then was asked what he was talking about.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “You know what I mean. Whether it’s former players. . . .”
Was he talking about Diggs?
“Yeah, and again, I love 14, I still do,” Allen said. “But everyone wants to keep making this thing a thing. We’re so focused on what’s going on inside of our building and that’s the only thing we’re caring about right now.”
Here’s what Allen said, after a 47-10 win during which he spread the ball around to 10 different receivers: “It’s paying dividends of what we’ve worked on throughout the entire offseason and through training camp of the ‘everybody eats’ mentality. And, again, it could be your play this play. You never know when it’s gonna happen. And that’s the beauty of it. When guys get to buy into this and really understand, like, ‘I may not get the ball four, five times thrown to me a game, but the one or two times I do, I’m gonna have opportunities to be in the end zone.’ You know, it’s a fun and wonderful thing when you have a bunch of guys that don’t care about the stats, they don’t care about the touchdowns, and again, I think throughout practice, we’ve just had this mindset of like, ‘Hey, let’s just do things the right way and find ways to win football games. That’s what we’re doing right now.”
Whether he meant it as a shot at Diggs or not, it’s hard to see Allen’s characterization of the dynamic as a new development. Which means that it previously was that way. Since Diggs was previously on the team — and given his habit of from time to time getting a little demonstrative during games (and/or skipping out on media obligations after games) — it’s hard not to infer that Allen sees things differently because Diggs is gone.