Donald Butler earned his way to a new contract. Tom Telesco was right to sign him to that deal in 2014.

Of course, Butler being released two years later makes the Butler pact another offseason loss for Telesco. But it’s difficult to look back and say the Chargers general manager should have known Butler was the kind of guy who was going to pack it in after padding his bank account.

Butler was a defensive captain the year before getting his contract. He was smart and instinctual and aggressive. He made a hustle play in the 2013 playoffs that will remain one of the franchise’s finest postseason moments.

But the lasting image of Butler is that of a thief. He robbed Telesco and the Chargers. It’s difficult, in fact, to understand how a man with any pride could even have shown up at Chargers Park the past year or so with as much as Butler stole from the team.


It takes a lot of nerve to pontificate about a professional athlete quitting.

I’ve done it only once before. I feel just as confident doing it now.

Butler’s larceny over the past two seasons was the second-most egregious example of a high-rent player quitting on the Chargers after only what Jared Gaither did in 2012.

David Boston took $12 million for one season of decent production and methodical destruction. (That’s 2003 dollars, so consider it more than $15 million had it been for 2015.) The Chargers paid about $17 million in 2015 dollars to waste the second overall pick and set the franchise back at least three years when they drafted Ryan Leaf in 1998.


Those are greater whiffs by the team. Whereas, what Butler and Gaither perpetrated was fraud.

Butler got $15.5 million of the $51.8 million contract he signed after the 2013 season. A desperate Chargers brass gave Gaither $13.5 million guaranteed for what turned out to be four games in one season.

Butler at least started 22 games and played some 1,200 snaps the past two seasons.

Played, however, is a generous assessment.


Watch the film. It’s like Butler lost interest. A guy who was a playmaker, a hustler, on the verge of being a ballhawk, started going the wrong way, stopping, sometimes hardly starting. There were a few games after which his uniform might have actually been clean.

He was out of shape in 2014. Yes, the year after realizing the big bucks, he came in fat and slow.

To his credit, he worked hard the next offseason, got lean and quick, and seemed ready to regain some of his playmaking form in ’15. But a combination of the team having all but given up on him by that time and his own inability to truly assert himself on the field made it a foregone conclusion that Thursday would happen.

It shouldn’t have, but it had to.