Last year, the Chargers took a flier with a seventh-round pick on former LSU receiver Demetrius Byrd, who suffered serious injuries in a car accident only days before the 2009 draft.
Nearly a year later, the Chargers have decided to move on.
The team has announced that Byrd has been released. Says the statement from the team: “Despite the injuries, the Chargers selected him and generously extended him a contract for the season.”
And that’s the point where the Chargers blew, in our estimation, any goodwill resulting from their decision to take a chance on Byrd. It’s not a charity; they drafted and paid him in the hopes that he’d fully recover, and that he’d become much more than any seventh-round pick ever is expected to be. He apparently hasn’t recovered, and so the Chargers are moving on.
So why not just call it was it is, instead of attempting to make themselves look far more altruistic than they ever intended to be?
Meanwhile, we wish Byrd well -- and we hope he gets a chance to make a real contribution for an NFL team. Preferably the Broncos, Raiders, or Chiefs.