When an athlete of Antonio Brown’s fame and caliber starts throwing attitude bombs all over the internet, the implications can be far-reaching. Brown’s latest salvos at the Steelers have certainly worked their way into the scouting combine—everyone from Pittsburgh general manager Kevin Colbert to Oklahoma receiver Marquise Brown (Antonio Brown’s cousin) have found themselves answering far more questions about Brown’s NFL future and how he may be affecting it than anything to do with Marquise Brown himself, or any of the prospects the Steelers might be looking at.
That Brown would prefer a divorce from the Steelers at this point is abundantly clear. That Colbert will give him that divorce under the right trade circumstances is something Colbert confirmed when he took the podium earlier this week in Indianapolis.
“Antonio Brown is one of the best players in the National Football League,” Colbert said Wednesday. “We’d like to have him on our team. If you’re going to lose a player like that—if you decide to take a player like that off your team—you’d better have the compensation that will justify removing that player. That would be significant compensation with a draft pick or picks, or a player and picks, just so you can balance the great loss if you lose a player like that.”
Colbert said that three teams had reflected serious interest in Brown’s services, and that he’d be talking to a lot more personnel people throughout this week. But while that’s been happening, Brown has been re-establishing his own insistence that he’s the wronged party in what has become an intractable drama.
On HBO’s the Shop, Brown recently brought up a pass quarterback Ben Roethlisberger threw to him in a November loss to the Broncos. Roethlisberger had criticized Brown’s route-running on an interception, and months later, Brown was still holding onto that.
“You know, all you have to go do is call me out, we lose the game, he’s like, damn, AB should have ran a better route,” Brown said. “The type of guy he is. He feels like he’s the owner. Bro, you threw the s–t to the D-lineman! What the f–k? I’m over here wide open! You need to give me a better ball! But it’s like in the league, you’re going to have a guy from the team that’ll be like, boy, you can’t say nothing. I need you to get out there like, but it’s like why I got to be acting? At least ask a n—-r how he feels first. Right or wrong. Right? Then if it don’t matter how I feel, then f–k it then, why am I here, you know what I’m saying?”
Well, everyone knows what he’s saying. And while Roethlisberger could justifiably be criticized for calling his teammates out publicly, there’s also no question that the quarterback is king in this situation. When the Steelers replaced former offensive coordinator Todd Haley with ex-receivers and quarterbacks coach Randy Fichtner, there was a reason for that—Roethlisberger’s relationship with Haley had become severely strained, and Fichtner was “Ben’s guy.”
Brown doesn’t have any of “his guys” on the coaching staff. And after the events that happened late in the season, he may not have too many of “his guys” in the locker room. More than one Steelers source has told me that the real mess between Brown and the Steelers started when the players elected receiver JuJu Smith-Schuster as the team’s MVP, and Brown was miffed that he wasn’t elected instead. Brown skipped workouts in the week leading up to the Steelers’ season finale against the Bengals and was inactive for the game. Leaving at halftime as he did further complicated matters.
So now, people close to the organization believe that the Steelers will not be able to get the kind of return Colbert desires, simply because the drumbeat about Brown’s prickly reactions have a lot of teams wondering if the attendant soap opera is worth it, no matter how good Brown is on the field.
And that’s Antonio Brown’s primary problem right now. At this point, he’s like any other employee with great talent, trying to find the right situation for him. He may be the CEO of Antonio Brown, Inc., but the NFL is still the parent company—and with every one of those attitude bombs thrown out, Brown is inherently tanking his own value to the league.
“I don’t even have to play football, bro,” Brown recently told ESPN’s Jeff Darlington. “I don’t even need the game. If they wanna play, they gonna play by my rules.”
An interesting conceit, but again, Brown’s primary issue is that, in this particular arena, the players don’t make the rules unless the teams let them, and Brown is absolutely on the outside looking in.
