DETROIT — Titus Young’s trade value was so low when the Lions placed him on waivers this week that General Manager Martin Mayhew said he didn’t even try to move him to another team.
“He didn’t really have any trade value,” Mayhew said Thursday. “I didn’t talk to anybody, I didn’t call 32 GMs and try to get a seventh — or anything like that. It’s my job to know sort of what his value is, and he didn’t have any trade value.”
The Lions released Young on Monday, the first day transactions were allowed following the Super Bowl, after repeated acts of insubordinate behavior last season.
He was sent home in May for punching teammate Louis Delmas during off-season workouts, benched for a week after he purposely lined up in the wrong spot in a November loss to Green Bay, and kicked off the team permanently when he returned after Thanksgiving and remained a distraction in the locker room.
Lions coach Jim Schwartz said Young’s Twitter rant against fans and about wanting a new start last month “probably didn’t have a ton to do with” his release, and that the decision to cut ties with a 2011 second-round pick came down to “an accumulation of a lot of things.”
“We obviously went through a lot” to try to make it work with him, Schwartz said. “We had our incident last spring. … And then we had a couple other incidents and kept him away again, and then he came back and we still had other incidents, and at that point it was done. But we certainly exhausted all of our resources in trying to keep him productive and keep him in a team mode, but it wasn’t successful.”
Young was claimed off waivers by St. Louis on Tuesday.
