If anything was clear from the Lions’ press conference today, it was how much rope they gave disgruntled-and-now-former wide receiver Titus Young, and how they then reached the end of their own rope with him.
General manager Martin Mayhew said he didn’t even bother to try to trade the former second-rounder.
“He didn’t really have any trade value,” Mayhew said, via Anwar Richardson of MLive.com. “I didn’t talk to anybody. I didn’t call 32 GMs and try to get a seventh, or anything like that. I think it’s my job to know sort of what his value is, and he didn’t have any trade value.
Young was claimed off waivers by the receiver-needy Rams, but coach Jim Schwartz said the organization gave plenty of chances to a guy who sucker-punched a teammate and deliberately lined up incorrectly because he didn’t think enough passes were going his way
“We obviously went through a lot,” Schwartz said. “We had our incident last spring (punching Louis Delmas). We took quite a few steps there. He came back onto the team and was fairly productive and wasn’t a distraction.
“We had a couple of other incidents and kept him away again, and came back, and we still had other incidents, and at that point, it was done. We certainly exhausted all of our resources in trying to keep him productive and keep him in a team mood, but it wasn’t successful.”
Clearly, there were no regrets, other than wasting a pick on Young.
“I think it was an accumulation of a lot of things,” Schwartz said. “The thing we have to always keep in mind is what’s best for the team as we move forward, and just like making decisions with [cutting Stephen] Peterman and Kyle Vanden Bosch, we also had to make a decision here that was best for the team.
“You can be at peace with decisions with that as long as you recognize that you’re making the decision for what’s best for the team. In that case, that’s what we did.”
It’s hard to imagine things turning out much differently in St. Louis, but the Lions also recognized the problem wasn’t going to fix itself, so they took action this time rather than letting the character problems continue to accumulate.