So I'll be honest... I defended that deal at the time.
The reality is... in terms of AAV, they gave nearly the same deal to Crabtree. Granted, it was a shorter deal with less guaranteed money, but the Grant deal was like $14.5M guaranteed. For context, they're paying Willie Snead like $6M a year, and he has equally a garbage resume as Grant and he's actually played here already.
I was wrong about Grant (obviously) but I liked the deal because he was younger than most of our FA signings, the guaranteed money wasn't that much (nor was the AAV), and if you actually gave him the volume of a #1 or #2 WR, I think his stats would have been significantly better, because his efficiency on the targets he was getting was actually quite good.
That being said... neither of those deals (Crabtree or Grant) would have been worth anything to us.
oh i absolutely defended the deal - in hindsight i was wrong - like you i kind of justified it by the traits he had and that the production would come off the back of it but evidently that would have been a bad signing