Few players have had more troubling offseasons than the 27-year-old Galette, who went undrafted in part because of incidents that led him to be kicked off of Temple’s team. Galette hadn’t registered any public problems as a pro before, but it’s been a busy offseason. In January, he was arrested on domestic violence charges, which were later dropped. In June, Galette suffered a serious pectoral injury that was expected to jeopardize his availability for the early part of the season. Then, last week, there surfaced a video that allegedly showed Galette hitting a man and striking a woman with a belt during a 2013 fight in Miami. That appears to have been the final straw for the Saints, who released Galette on Friday.
The Saints have begun to leak reports that Galette was a bad teammate and negative influence in the locker room, and I don’t doubt that he was a problem, but I’m very skeptical that those issues had a meaningful part in this decision. New Orleans had been around Galette for five years, during which it gave him two contract extensions, before suddenly deciding that he was a locker-room cancer. (It’s unclear if they knew about the 2013 incident before last week.) Galette’s teammates even voted him to be one of the team’s captains.
I don’t think the Saints saw Galette as a problem before 2014, which makes it difficult to criticize their decision to sign him to an extension last year. New Orleans signed Galette, a restricted free agent at the time, to a three-year, $7.5 million deal in March 2013. What we could have seen happening in advance is Saints general manager Mickey Loomis spending money before he had to.
