The New Orleans Saints have called up two practice-squad defenders for Monday night’s game against the Atlanta Falcons, adding edge rusher Fadil Diggs and linebacker Jackson Sirmon to the active roster for a standard elevation, via insider Katherine Terrell.
New Orleans made the moves official Monday as the Saints prepared to host Atlanta at the Caesars Superdome.
Kickoff is set for 8:15 p.m. ET on ESPN, with both clubs arriving at 1-2 and the winner moving to 2-2 in a still-crowded NFC South.
The night also marks the 20th anniversary of the Superdome’s reopening after Hurricane Katrina, when these same two rivals met in 2006.
The elevations come with the front seven thinner than New Orleans would like.
Linebacker Kaden Elliss, who returned to the Saints this offseason after three years in Atlanta, has been ruled out with a calf injury and will miss the game against his former team. Edge rusher Carl Granderson is also out.
Standard elevations do not require a corresponding roster cut. Diggs and Sirmon can play Monday and return to the practice squad afterward, a common way for teams to patch a short-handed defense without spending a roster spot.
Diggs is the more familiar name of the two. The Saints took him with the 254th overall pick in the 2025 draft after a final college season at Syracuse, where he transferred following four years at Texas A&M.
As a fifth-year senior and team captain for the Orange, he started all 12 games and led the club with 14 tackles for loss and 7.5 sacks.
At the combine, he ran a 4.57-second 40-yard dash at 6-foot-4 and 257 pounds, the kind of athletic profile that made a late-round edge rusher worth developing. His NFL path has been less linear.
He appeared in five games as a rookie in 2025 without recording a statistic, spent time bouncing between the active roster and the practice squad, and was waived at the end of training camp this summer before signing back with the practice squad the next day. He has not played in a game in 2026.
Sirmon arrived in New Orleans in late May. The 6-foot-2, 240-pound linebacker went undrafted out of California in 2024, spent his rookie year on the New York Jets’ practice squad, and appeared in one regular-season game in 2025. In college he played at Washington and Cal, finishing with 301 tackles over 51 games.
There is a family connection on the sideline: his father, Peter Sirmon, is the Saints’ linebackers coach and coached him at Cal. For a defense already missing Elliss, that familiarity may matter as much as the snap count.
Neither call-up is expected to change the shape of the game. Tyler Shough and the Saints’ passing attack have carried the offense through three weeks, and Atlanta still has Bijan Robinson to contain.
What the elevations do is give New Orleans two more bodies who already know the install, on a night when the available linebackers and edge rushers are fewer than the depth chart suggested a week ago.
