After Sunday night’s loss to the 49ers, Cowboys cornerback Trevon Diggs confronted Mike Leslie of WFAA regarding a second-quarter tweet that questioned Diggs’s effort on a long catch and run by San Francisco tight end George Kittle. On Monday, Diggs addressed the situation on teammate Micah Parsons’s podcast.
“I just felt like it was unnecessary,” Diggs said regarding Leslie’s tweet. “I just felt like he was trying to use my name for clicks. And after the game I just happened to see it. I looked, I clicked on it, I seen who it was, and I was like, ‘Oh, he’s right here. I just saw you.’ So I went up to him, and I just spoke how I felt.
“I feel there was a lot of emotions just losing, coming off the game, and we’re fresh off the loss. I’m a competitor, so I’m wanting to win. So just a lot of emotions. I kind of let my emotions get the best of me. But at the end of the day it still doesn’t make it right for anybody just to be saying anything or just trying to throw dirt on your name or make you seem like you were doing bad or a bad job, because I felt I played my hardest game yesterday. I felt like I did everything I could. I felt like I was tackling, setting the edges, just doing everything to help my team win. And for him to try to throw that on my name, it just didn’t sit right with me, because he was like completely wrong.”
Diggs made it clear that he has no problem with being called out if he does something that justifies criticism. He disagrees that he deserved criticism on that play.
“If I was wrong, like if I gave up the play, gave up the touchdown or something like, I can’t say nothing,” Diggs said. “Like, I have to take that on the chin. But it’s like you’re just anything, I’m not going for that. I’m not going to just allow you to try to make me seem out of that play, make me seem like I’m the problem. That’s not cool. And you’re right here. You work for the Cowboys — you’re not [working] for the Cowboys, you work with us. Like, you might not know what’s going on, but you know that wasn’t on me. So it just was weird to me. And I just didn’t like that.”
He clearly didn’t like it. And he clearly let his emotions get the better of him, as confirmed by the fact that he refused to speak to reporters in the locker room. As coach Mike McCarthy said Monday, Diggs and other players sometimes need to take the high road.
Still, the fact that something from roughly two hours earlier set Diggs off shows how the frustration and pressure is getting to the Cowboys, who are only one loss away from matching the total of five they had in each of the three prior seasons. With nine games to go in 2024.