FRISCO, Texas — Peace has arrived to the Dallas Cowboys locker room.
Following the Cowboys’ 30-24 “Sunday Night Football” loss at the San Francisco 49ers in Week 8,Pro Bowl cornerback Trevon Diggs lashed out at WFAA’s Mike Leslie, a sports anchor and reporter for ABC’s local Dallas affiliate, for Leslie’s tweet questioning his effort in pursuit of 49ers tight end George Kittle on a 43-yard catch-and-run. Diggs came out of the locker room in his shoulder pads and full uniform and rhetorically yelled at Leslie while the reporter attempted to ask questions to clarify Diggs’ role on that play. The exchange ended when Diggs said, “We can talk about deez nuts,” in response to Leslie saying, “We can talk about it more.”
“I just felt like we was playing football. From my point of view, I didn’t think I did anything wrong, but everyone has their own opinion,” Diggs said Wednesday while face-to-face with local media, including Leslie. “I felt like I was the last line of defense. My man was up the field, and I was behind the safeties at the time so like, yeah, I was the last line of defense and I felt like I prevented him from scoring. I took the highest angle. Yeah. I didn’t think that my effort was a problem.”
Cooler heads ended up prevailing Wednesday afternoon following the team’s practice. Diggs spent around 11 minutes answering questions from local media members, including Leslie, and he gifted Leslie a can of nuts from the brand Dee’s Nuts. The cornerback offered Leslie a choice of flavors between ranch and banana pudding, and Leslie chose ranch.
“Yeah, I shouldn’t have reacted the way I reacted. I apologize for that. Must have caught me at the right time,” Diggs said.
His college football head coach at Alabama, Nick Saban, had a famous line about how dangerous consuming the media coverage of the team is for his players, calling reading articles or watching video stories about the team “rat poison.” Diggs agreed that reading Leslie’s tweet questioning his effort right after the loss in San Francisco is exactly what Saban instructed him not to do when in school.
“Yeah, it may have been a little rat poison,” Diggs said laughing. “Fell for the bait a little bit. He caught me at the right time.”
However, that won’t keep Diggs off Twitter or any other social media platform.
“It’s 2024. Social media, this is it. This is what is in. Everyone’s on social media. That’s just what it is. It’s just a part of our life now,” Diggs said. “I don’t see nothing wrong with me going online after the game or anybody going online after the game, checking what you want to check. Maybe I want to get away from the game and just scroll.”
For a player who won a national championship with Alabama in 2017 and experienced three consecutive seasons with the Cowboys that entailed winning 12 games, Diggs has struggled dealing with a 3-4 start to 2024.
“It is tough,” Diggs said when asked about keeping his composure. “We’re losing. It doesn’t feel good. I hate losing. I like to win, a lot of frustration. Yeah, really just frustrated. You want to win so bad and you do everything you can to win and you don’t get the win. It’s easy to get frustrated.”
One of the more surprising elements of the Diggs-Leslie exchange from the cornerback’s end is that he typically comes across as shy or an introvert, to say the very least. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t care about winning even though he isn’t showing his emotions like that on a regular basis.
“I definitely care. I definitely want to win. I definitely have a lot of emotions that I don’t show,” Diggs said. “So, I let that moment get the best of me. Like I said, you got to keep the main thing, the main thing. At the end of the day we lost, we all got to play better. We all got to find a way to win.”
Diggs explained that the Cowboys coaching staff has been harping on tackling all season since Dallas is the fourth-worst tackling squad in the NFL with a 14.9% missed tackle rate. Only the Miami Dolphins (15.5%), Cleveland Browns (16.3%) and Las Vegas Raiders (16.4%) have been worse. That’s a major departure from a season when ago when the Cowboys were the NFL’s best tackling team with the league’s lowest missed tackle rate (9.5%).
“Tackling and stopping the run, we knew that they were going to run the ball a lot, so that was definitely an emphasis. I made sure I did that. Made sure I did my job. Just trying to help my team. I mean I’m not a (former Seattle Seahawks safety and Legion of Boom member) Kam Chancellor. But when it’s my time to make a play, I try to do the best I can to the best of my ability. But tackling isn’t my [strength], it’s not my superpower, but I can tackle. Yeah, just try to do the best I can with what I put on the field.”
Adapting to change
Diggs has carried the weight of being the Cowboys’ No. 1 corner for years, but 2024 has been different for him as he is in his first full season back since tearing his ACL in Week 3 of the 2023 season.
“It’s been, I’m not going to say it’s been hard; it’s just been some getting used to,” Diggs said. “I felt like last game, I felt like myself 110%. Felt like it’s been a year since I had my surgery, and it was like my year mark and I felt good. Banging and tackling and running and cutting. So I felt good.”
Diggs and Dallas’ defense as a whole established an elite reputation built on takeaways. During the Cowboys’ three consecutive seasons with 12 wins from 2021 to 2023, they led the NFL in takeaways (93), interceptions (59) and quarterback pressure rate (41.4%). Diggs leads the NFL with 16 interceptions since 2021, but only one of those has come this season and that was back in Week 1 off Cleveland Browns quarterback Deshaun Watson. The Cowboys metrics have taken a nose dive in 2024 without both three-time All-Pro edge rusher Micah Parsons (sidelined since Week 4) and 2023 NFL interceptions leader DaRon Bland (out since the end of training camp with a stress fracture in his foot). Dallas’ five takeaways in 2024 are tied for the fifth-fewest in the NFL, while the defense is slightly below average (17th in the league) in quarterback pressure rate (34.8%).
The lack of takeaways can be attributed to injures and roster attrition from Jerry Jones’ “all in” offseason, but the focus of new defensive coordinator Mike Zimmer’s defense is a lot less geared toward splash plays, which include takeaways, than Dan Quinn’s scheme was from 2021-2023. Dallas played man coverage at the third-highest rate in the NFL from 2021-2023 (33.8%), but in 2024 that figure was dropped to 26.3%, about middle of the pack — 15th-most in the league.
“Our defensive scheme now doesn’t really allow us to get a lot of turnovers,” Diggs said. “It’s more so just playing good football. Playing 11-man football. Yeah, a lot less vision on the ball. Just us being able to read our man, a lot less man [coverage]. … Definitely play-calling changed, the scheme is really different. Trying to make it work the best way we can. Definitely a very unique defense, a lot of calls, we got a lot of formations, shifting, different calls. It requires you to play a little bit slower, got to think more, instead of knowing what you have. Like knowing, ‘Okay I have this man. I can play faster. I can be on my man, I know what I have, instead of reading stuff and reading players.’ It’s a little bit more effort, but its still a good defense at the end of the day. We just have to all buy into it and put our best foot forward.”
Some may take that as a shot at Zimmer’s scheme, but that’s not what Diggs is saying. It’s more so operating it the way it’s designed, which is at its best rushing the passer. Should the Cowboys improve upon their 31st-ranked run defense (154.6 rushing yards allowed per game), so too will their 31st-ranked scoring defense (28.3 points per game allowed).
“It’s just getting used to it. The different calls, the different checks, how teams want to play us, too,” Diggs said. “They see that we have trouble with the run, so they run the ball a lot as opposed to the pass. It’s just little things like that, but hopefully we stop the run more, we get more passes and we can put the blitz packages and the different coverages that we have. …You can’t chase it [takeaways] because if you do chase it, you might give up something that’s going to cause a touchdown. So you really have to stay true to the defense, stay true to the keys and just play fast that way.”
