Packers awarded former All-Pro CB Trevon Diggs on waivers

The Green Bay Packers will get a reinforcement ahead of the playoffs. On Wednesday, the Packers were awarded cornerback Trevon Diggs after he was waived by the Dallas Cowboys on Tuesday, reportedly for staying back in his hometown of Washington after Christmas despite the team denying his request.

As we covered earlier in the week, Diggs has been about an average cornerback this year, but he’s historically had more production on the ball than the Packers’ group of cornerbacks. On top of that, Green Bay has already placed Kamal Hadden on the injured reserve after his injury last week and fellow cornerback Nate Hobbs appears to be banged up, too, all while Bo Melton has exclusively played receiver, not cornerback, this year. In short, the Packers were down on cornerback bodies going into the playoffs, which is why the team promoted two from their practice squad to the 53-man roster on Tuesday.

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Diggs has a lot of ties to Green Bay. First of all, he was recruited to Alabama by Packers passing game coordinator Derrick Ansley. He’s also very close with fellow Dallas Cowboys Micah Parsons. Parsons, along with quarterback Jordan Love and safety Xavier McKinney, shares the same agent as Diggs, Athletes First’s David Mulugheta. McKinney also played with Diggs at Alabama, and head coach Matt LaFleur is also represented by Athletes First.

The addition of Diggs will cost the Packers about half a million in cap space, but now, at minimum, they’ll have a non-practice squadder available to play in the playoffs if either Keisean Nixon or Carrington Valentine end up going down.

All of Diggs’ guarantees have expired, meaning his addition is functionally just for the end of this season. The Packers will likely release (or restructure) Diggs by the start of the 2026 new league year.

Green Bay had an open roster spot on the 53-man roster before this move, so there was no corresponding move that needed to be made. The Packers also had an open practice squad spot going into today, which they used to sign quarterback Desmond Ridder, a third-round pick in the 2022 draft.

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Update:

There’s been a bunch of stats thrown out there, so I wanted to update the bottom of this post with what I think is the most important stat for cornerbacks: Adjusted yards allowed per coverage snap.

The graph above plots all 429 seasons in which outside cornerbacks have played as many snaps as 2025 Trevon Diggs since 2020 (when he entered the league). Highlighted are all of Diggs’ seasons since then and qualifying Green Bay Packers seasons since 2020.

Adjusted yards allowed per coverage snap is like yards allowed per coverage snap, but it treats a surrendered touchdown as a bonus of 20 yards given up (on top of the pure yardage) and an interception caught as wiping out 45 yards. Why treat touchdown and interception values like this? Because it’s much more correlated to wins than passer rating.

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I have my own issues with passer rating, but I think it’s particularly dumb to use it to evaluate seasons that cornerbacks have had. For example, if a cornerback surrenders one reception on one target for eight yards over 50 coverage snaps, he would have surrendered a 100.0 passer rating for the game, a terrible rate. If you used adjusted yards allowed per coverage snap, though, eight yards given up on 50 coverage snaps is just 0.16, a great score.

Ultimately, a cornerback’s job is to prevent yardage being given up, targeted or not, not just to be efficient when targeted.

Either way, Diggs had a pretty significant drop-off between 2024 and 2025. Maybe a new home is what he needed to bounce back. With that being said, both Keisean Nixon and Carrington Valentine (who were above the NFL average in 2024) have also been in a slump this year, in part because everyone not named Micah Parsons has struggled to impact opposing quarterbacks.