It's unlikely that it would have caused a catastrophic failure unless, and this is a big unless, it was deployed at a higher AIS than normal.
The OV landing procedure is to touch down between 200 and 250 knots, then hold the nose up to bleed as much airspeed off before bringing it down. Only then is the chute deployed.
The reason i think this was a low risk mistake is that any landing where the drogue is deployed at faster then usual speeds probably means the front gear is down already, and if the nose gear (which is notoriously weak under load) is already down, there's probably a structural failure in progress already.
What people don't understand is that the landing gear on the shuttle is considered a 'Criticality 1' item by NASA. Any failure with them can mean the loss of an orbiter, and the peak load on each main gear at nose gear touchdown is too high for a single tire to carry it.
One situation where you might see early use of the drogue is in an abort or emergency landing at an unapproved emergency strip, and that's very unlikely. With the 1600 mile crossrange, a reentering shuttle can divert to many international airports with long runways. I've done a re-entry and landing of the shuttle at LAX and Sea-Tac in X-Plane, and failed to land it a bunch of times at smaller airstrips when I ran out of runway because I couldn't deploy the drogue early enough.
So again, while technically possible, I have to say I think it's unlikely it would have failed.
