The Seattle Seahawks signed Trevon Diggs to their 53-man active roster on Saturday. A year and a half ago that sentence would have been a major transaction. Now it is a team acknowledging it has run out of healthy cornerbacks.
Diggs was promoted off the practice squad ahead of Sunday’s game against San Francisco. He had been elevated for the previous week’s game, his Seattle debut, and played nine defensive snaps. On the same day, Seattle placed rookie cornerback Julian Neal on injured reserve with a hamstring injury.
The Resume Is Real and So Is the Gap in It
Diggs was a second-round pick by Dallas in 2020 and a first-team All-Pro in his second season. He has 20 career interceptions in 242 tackles. For about eighteen months he was one of the most feared ball-hawking corners in football.
Then came the knee problems. Dallas waived him last season. He played one game for Green Bay and was released in January. Seattle brought him in on a practice squad deal, which is where veterans go when nobody is willing to guarantee them a roster spot.
Nine snaps amounts to a tryout that happened to take place during a real NFL game. Seattle liked what it saw enough to give up a 53-man roster spot, though it is not clear whether that says more about Diggs’ legs or about the state of the depth chart behind him.
Why This Is the Right Gamble Anyway
Here is the case for Seattle. A cornerback who was All-Pro at 23 does not forget how to read a quarterback’s eyes. Diggs’ problem has been whether the knee will let him run, not whether he can find the ball. If it does, Seattle just added a starter for free in the middle of October.
And the alternative was worse. With Neal on injured reserve, the options are a practice squad body who has never played meaningful snaps or an outside free agent who has not been in a building since August. Diggs has at least been practicing with this defense.
The risk is also obvious. Teams attack a corner who cannot turn and run, and the NFL figures that out inside a quarter. If Diggs gets exposed on Sunday, Seattle will have burned a roster spot and a week of game planning to learn something it could have learned in practice.
This Is What the Middle of a Season Looks Like
No contract terms were disclosed, and Seattle has not said what role Diggs will have or how many snaps he is expected to play. Those are the things worth watching, not the name on the back of the jersey.
Signings like this get treated as nothing by everyone except the team making them. They are not nothing. Seasons get decided by which teams find a useful starter in the middle of October and which ones keep trotting out a backup who should not be on the field. Seattle took the swing. Now Diggs has to hold up.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
