Bears Waive Sam Hurd
(CBS) Bears general manager Jerry Angelo said the Bears will waive Sam Hurd Friday.
"There's been a wrong," he said. "We've acted. We have a track record of doing that. Unfortunately, a situation arose that caught us off guard, but not to the point where we aren't going to do the right thing. And the right thing is to cut Sam Hurd."
The Bears wide receiver was arrested Wednesday night on federal drug charges and his bond was set at $100,000 Friday. Hurd's lawyer said his client was disappointed that he had been waived.
"Sam's a football player," Attorney Brett Greenfield said. "He wants to play. He's a great asset to the Bears, or was a great asset to the Bears and he's going to be great asset hopefully to another organization in the near future."
Speaking to the media for the first time since the arrest, Angelo said the team did it everything it could in their background check of Hurd before signing the wide receiver to a three-year deal in July.
"For me to say we should have known something we didn't know, I can't say this," Angelo said. "There's no foundation for anybody to say that. No facts, no flags that anybody can present tangibly to say otherwise.
"I want to make that perfectly clear to the public and the fans. We did our homework. We do our due diligence. We did everything you could possibly do given the information we can allocate," he said. "Saying that, we go back, we ask questions, is there something we could have done, something we should have done in the process. Sometimes there are glitches. In this case there are none. I can sit here and tell you with total transparency that we did everything we could do in terms of our research and there was nothing we found that would create a flag or alert or real concern in Sam Hurd's case."
The general manager declined to say whether or not the Bears would try to recoup some of Hurd's $1.35 million signing bonus. He also resisted answering a question about whether or not other Bears players were involved in Hurd's alleged discretions.
"I can't talk about that," he said. "I'm certainly not going on any witch hunts about players."
