If you want to be a legitimate franchise player in the NFL, two things have to be true of you: You have to be among the best at your position, and you have to be able to make everyone around you better (or at least, you have to make things easier for them) by dint of your skill set.
There’s no question that both apply to Antonio Brown. His total receiving statistics from his fifth through his ninth NFL seasons top any other receiver in league history in that specific timeline — he’s the best ever in targets (859), receptions (576) and receiving yards (7,646). He’s third in that spectrum with 59 touchdowns, behind only Jerry Rice, Terrell Owens, and Marvin Harrison, and he’s blazing a trail to the Hall of Fame as much as anyone in the NFL right now.
Not bad for a sixth-round pick out of Central Michigan.
Of course, Brown would have been a Steeler for life if he weren’t a nuclear pain in the butt. At the combine, I heard from multiple Steelers sources telling me that, as much as there is a narrative about the all-over drama in Pittsburgh’s locker room, most of the off-field silliness orbited around Brown. He forced the hand of general manager Kevin Colbert into a deal that looks like a landslide win for Oakland, and a crushing defeat for Pittsburgh. Given the Pier-Sixers between these two teams back in the 1970s, one imagines Al Davis smiling from above.
Off the field, Brown is now Oakland’s problem. On the field, he is now Oakland’s amazing opportunity.
The Raiders had the cap space to rip up Brown’s old deal, give him a new one, and hand the Steelers a third-round and a fifth-round pick in this trade. The new contract was the main thing, though–Brown wasn’t going anywhere if he didn’t get a new one–and with that, he’ll have to see what he can do in a Raiders offense with a relatively unproven quarterback in Derek Carr, a receiver group that is at this point highly underwhelming, and an under-construction offensive line coached and designed by Tom Cable, perhaps the least qualified coach in the NFL do to such a thing.
Are there problems? Sure. But even after handing Brown his new deal, Oakland head coach Jon Gruden and general manager Mike Mayock still have cap space to spend in free agency, and they quire remarkably managed to acquire Brown without giving up any of their three first-round picks.
So, to say that Brown is entering an impossible situation is to damn the whole thing before free agency and the draft when the Raiders have as much combined capital as any team to turn that around.
So, when asking how Brown will help Oakland’s offense, let’s try and look at it in a vacuum and see what he’s got left.
I went back through Brown’s last few games with the Steelers — of course, the season finale against the Bengals wasn’t part of that, because he was inactive after blowing off practices that week. But even as things were falling apart between the two parties, Brown was still doing his thing to the tune of 104 catches for 1,297 yards, and a league-leading 15 touchdowns. The team that gets Brown won’t be getting the mopey Randy Moss the Raiders got in 2005 and 2006; they’ll instead have one of the best receivers of his generation, and it’s worth looking once again at how Brown is able to do that.
Really, the only flaw Brown has on the field at this point in his career is that he isn’t 6 feet 5 and 230 pounds. He’s never going to be your best contested-catch guy, though he’s stronger than his 5-10, 181-pound frame might indicate, he also doesn’t need to make a ton of contested catches. Brown’s game is to end the contests before they begin, and he does that with a supernatural combination of speed, agility, and route awareness. No other receiver in the league today is better at mining small openings in coverage and blasting them into crater-sized holes.
Brown went out of his Steelers career with a bang, catching 14 passes on 19 targets for 185 yards and two touchdowns. This 3-yard touchdown against the New Orleans Saints shows how Brown can turn a pick play in a compressed space into a big valley for an easy score. Cornerbacks Marshon Lattimore and P.J. Williams don’t stand a chance against Brown’s elevated awareness of how to create space.
Another way in which Brown separates himself from the pack, both literally and figuratively, is his ability to adjust to the scramble drill when his quarterback breaks contain and starts looking for targets on improvisation routes. Here, safety Von Bell has to deal with Brown’s fade route that turned back inside when Brown saw Ben Roethlisberger rolling to his right. Immediately, Brown cut back inside and ran a brilliant deep curl under Bell’s coverage.
This 17-yard touchdown against the New England Patriots in Week 15 shows just how unpleasant life can be when you’re covering Brown on a switch release–basically, when two receivers cross quickly off the line of scrimmage and run their routes against defenders who have to adjust to receivers they didn’t expect.
Here, receiver James Washington takes cornerback Stephon Gilmore inside on the crosser, while safety Duron Harmon has to deal with Brown up the seam. Harmon is an excellent player, but this is a mismatch from the pre-snap phase.
Brown has long been recognized as perhaps the best route runner in the game, and one of the more underrated aspects of this talent is how he’s able to absolutely destroy cornerbacks with leverage into his cuts — master classes in how to “sink” into routes. In this 28-yard Week 13 touchdown against the Chargers, watch how he extends cornerback Michael Davis all over the field. Davis opens up his hips because he thinks Brown’s going outside, Brown sees that and works his way inside after selling the outside fake. Davis does a credible job of recovering, but then, Brown breaks away from Davis and safety Adrian Phillips with another pretty cut to the goal post.
Brown is just as good as he’s ever been, he’ll be 31 years old when the 2019 season starts, and there’s no physical drop-off evident. As long as he keeps his head in the game, Brown is the very definition of a franchise player — the best in the business at what he does, with the ability to make all around him better at what they do.
Now, he’ll have to do it without an established paradigm in place as he had when the Steelers selected him in 2010. But to automatically insist that Brown’s career as a top receiver is effectively over because he’s falling a few floors in short-term offensive production is to underestimate what he can still do–and what can be done around him.
